BOY SCOUTS 
LIFE OF 

LIMCOLN 




IDA M. TARBELJ 




Class b: 4 ^^ 7 
Book. 



rr IS 



GoiJ^Tighl N"._. >i^>vii^6 



COPyRIGJIT DEFOSrr. 



Other Books 
By THE SAME AUTHOR 



Father Abraham 

He Knew Lincoln 

In Lincoln's Chair 

Life of Abraham Lincoln 




Lincoln- Hegins His Career as a Puri.ic Servant 



BOY SCOUTS' 

LIFE OF LINCOLN 



BY 

IDA M. TARBELL 



I13eto ^Otk 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1 921 

All righit reserved 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 






Copyright, 1921, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Set up and electrotyped. Published October^ 1921. 



OCT ^1 1921 



Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 

New York, U. S. A. 



'C!.A6300:^0 



TO 

F. S. T. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I PAGB 

A Pioneer Boy i 

CHAPTER II 
He Finds His Kingdom 26 

CHAPTER III 
Starting Out for Himself 46 

CHAPTER IV 
A Great Decision 76 

CHAPTER V 
The Call of His Country 97 

CHAPTER VI 
The Fight of His Life 119 

CHAPTER VII 
The Big Giant of Illinois 144 

CHAPTER VIII 
Armed with A Single Purpose 172 

CHAPTER IX 
Steady in Storms 199 

CHAPTER X 
Victory! 225 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Lincoln begins his career as a public servant . Frontispiece 

FACING 
PAGE 

They had to cut their road as they went .... 10 

Facsimile of lines from Lincoln's copy-book. . . 20 

Running a ferry across the great Ohio 21 

Map showing Lincoln's supposed line of march in 

Black Hawk War 6i 

Facsimile of map of Albany, made by Lincoln . . 69 

Facsimile of a report of a road survey by Lincoln . . 73 

The earliest known portrait of Lincoln . . . . 115 

Lincoln in February, i860, at the time of the Cooper 

Institute speech 148 

Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac . . . 197 

Mr. Lincoln and his son "Tad" 227 

Statue of Lincoln, made by George Gray Barnard . 245 



BOY SCOUTS' 
LIFE OF LINCOLN 



BOY SCOUTS' 
LIFE OF LINCOLN 

CHAPTER I 
A Pioneer Boy 

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, 
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the 
earth. 

Walt Whitman. 

''r-ry OM LINCOLN has bought a farm;" that 
I is what all his Kentucky relatives — half- 
brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and 
cousins, were saying to one another. To be sure, 
Tom was a carpenter, but in those days in Ken- 
tucky — it was in 1803 that the farm was bought — 
people felt rightly that the great business of a man, 
as in all newly settled countries, was clearing and 
breaking the land, opening roads, driving out In- 
dians and wild beasts. 

As Tom was only twenty-three years old and since 
he was five had been an orphan with no settled home, 
this buying of a farm was an event in the family. It 
meant that he was going to settle down; perhaps that 
he was getting ready to marry. And, as a matter of 
fact, that is what it did mean, for on June 12, 1806, 



2 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

he was married to a girl called Nancy Hanks, like 
himself an orphan, dependent upon her kinsfolk — a 
sister of the man with whom he had learned his 
trade, Joseph Hanks of Elizabethtown. 

A wedding was a great event in those days. Peo- 
ple came from long distances, often remaining over- 
night for the infare or reception. The day after 
Nancy Hanks' and Thomas Lincoln's wedding, an 
infare was given jointly by her guardian and her 
uncle, Richard Berry, at the latter's home near 
Springfield, Kentucky. The supper was long talked 
of. There was every luxury that pioneer life af- 
forded — roast venison, bear steak, barbacued sheep, 
roasted wild turkeys and ducks; fruit and maple 
syrups served in big gourds ; peaches and honey — a 
dozen dishes unknown to a feast in our day. 

Tom and Nancy Lincoln did not go to live at once 
on their farm, but for two years remained in Eliza- 
bethtown, thirteen miles away, Tom getting his land 
ready for cultivation and plying his trade as he 
could. When they finally moved into the country, 
they carried with them a little girl, a year old. And 
here on this farm, a year later, the 12th of Febru- 
ary, 1 809, a boy was born. He was named after his 
grandfather Abraham — Abraham Lincoln. 

The cabin home where the little boy was born was 
similar to the first homes of most of the Kentucky 
settlers in those early days. It was built of oak 
logs, ten to a side, forming walls about seven feet 
in height. The openings between the logs were 
chinked with mortar of clay and stones, making a 
solid wall, warm in winter and cool in summer. At 



A Pioneer Boy 3 

one end of the cabin was a big outside chimney, its 
base of logs and clay, its stack of the flat stones of 
that part of the world. Inside, over the great fire- 
place was a mantel. A crane swung from one side, 
on which the pots were hung. And there was a wide 
stone hearth. There was but one window and one 
door in this cabin, and the window never had other 
covering than a dressed deerskin or oiled paper, 
glass being almost unknown in Kentucky at that 
time. 

The little boy never knew much of his birth- 
place because, when he was between four and five 
years old, his father moved to a new farm some 
fifteen miles to the east — a much larger piece of 
land, over two hundred acres, and much more in- 
teresting as it was surrounded by high hills and was 
heavily wooded with sycamore, oak, beech, hickory 
— all the trees of that part of the world. 

The woods were full of wild fowl, and big and 
little animals. The land was cut by picturesque ra- 
vines and threaded by a brook, so clear that you 
could see a pebble at the bottom. Knob Creek the 
stream was called. At the northern boundary of 
the farm it emptied into the Rolling Fork of the 
Salt River, a stream which flows into the Ohio west 
of Louisville. 

By the time a boy was five years old in those 
pioneer days he began to help his father and mother, 
and little Abraham soon was bringing in wood and 
carrying water to the field where his father worked, 
picking berries in the summer and nuts in the fall 
and, when planting was going on, dropping seeds. 



4 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

One of the few things about this farm he remem- 
bered when he grew up was a disaster that came to 
seeds he had dropped. His father was planting 
corn in what they called the big field — seven acres 
lying in the valley along the creek. Little Abraham 
followed him and into every other hill of every other 
row he dropped two pumpkin seeds. The field must 
have seemed pretty big to a seven-year-old boy, and 
he must have felt almost as discouraged as his father 
probably did when, just after the planting was fin- 
ished, a big rain sent the water rushing down all 
the gorges on the farm, flooding the entire valley 
and of course washing out the pumpkin seeds as well 
as the corn. 

But life on the farm was not all work, nor was it 
lonely. Abraham had not only his sister Sarah as a 
companion, but he had a schoolmate, Austin Golla- 
her; and when school was not in session — which was 
much of the time, the term rarely being over three 
months of the year — they visited back and forth 
whenever their mothers would consent, and on these 
visits had many adventures. The most exciting was 
one Sunday when they were looking for partridges 
which Abraham had seen a few days before. Knob 
Creek was high that day, and they wanted to cross 
it. In the effort to walk a log, Abraham Lincoln 
fell in. Neither of the boys could swim, and it was 
only the courage and quick wit of Austin Gollaher 
that saved his playmate. Seizing a long pole, he 
succeeded in getting his drowning companion ashore. 
He thought he was dead when he had landed him, 
and was badly scared; but he was a good Scout, 



A Pioneer Boy 5 

though he had none of the fine training that a Scout 
gets in our days. "I rolled and pounded him in 
dead earnest," he used to say in telling the story, 
"then I got him by the arms and shook him, the 
water meanwhile pouring out of his mouth. By 
this means I succeeded in bringing him to, and he 
soon was all right." 

It was not only partridges that drew the boys to 
the woods. Part of the education of the pioneer 
was to know the tracks of animals, the call and 
flight of birds and fowls, the spots where the biggest 
berries grew, the pools fish loved. Every sound of 
earth and air, every change of color in the tree or 
the ground, every print of hoof or claw, every trail 
of snake, must be recognized. Abraham and Aus- 
tin learned to know where a fox had passed, a deer 
had drunk, an eagle nested. They knew the honk of 
the wild goose, the song of the cardinal bird, and no 
doubt they ran from many a real or imaginary bear, 
and killed snakes that were their friends as well as 
those that were their enemies. 

There was not much schooling, though both 
boys, as long as they lived, remembered the names 
of two of their teachers — Zachariah Riney and 
Caleb Hazel. Abraham learned much more at 
home than he did at school, for his mother was am- 
bitious that her children should have opportunities 
that she and her husband had never had. It was in 
the long evenings that most of her teaching was 
done. Sitting on the doorstep, looking over the 
lovely land in the summer, or before the great roar- 
ing fire in the stone fireplace in the winter, Nancy 



6 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

and Tom Lincoln told their children all the stories 
they knew — stories of the Bible, of their own lives 
and of the lives of all their forebears. In these long 
evenings the children learned of the tragedy of the 
Garden of Eden, how the boy Moses was rescued 
from the bullrushes and grew up to be one of the 
great men of the land. They became acquainted 
with Isaac and Jacob and Samuel and David and 
Goliath — the good men and the bad men of the Old 
Testament. They heard the beautiful story of the 
Christ and His Disciples, and were taught to repeat 
chapter after chapter of the wise and beautiful songs 
and proverbs and teachings of the great Book. 

It was in these evenings, on the doorstep or by the 
fire that Sarah and Abraham Lincoln learned all 
they knew of the families of their father and mother. 
There were many tales of hardship and of thrilling 
adventure, for both Thomas Lincoln and Nancy 
Hanks had been carried from Virginia into Ken- 
tucky when very little children. Their families had 
traveled in great oxcarts, on horseback and on foot, 
in company with other pioneers, along a famous 
highway called the Old Wilderness Road. There 
were still Indians and dangerous beasts in the woods 
so that every mile of the journey had to be made in 
watchfulness. 

The story which they remembered longest was 
that of the death of their own grandfather Lincoln, 
for whom Abraham was named. Grandfather Lin- 
coln had come to Kentucky with his family when 
Thomas was only about two years old. There were 
four older children — half brothers and half sisters 



A Pioneer Boy 7 

of Thomas. Like all the pioneers of those days, 
they went for safety to live in what was called a 
stockade, made by arranging the log cabins of a 
group of settlers around a small court. The cabins 
were connected by high stout fences. There was but 
one entrance to a stockade, and no openings in the 
outside wall of these cabins excepting for rifle. 

Abraham Lincoln was a rich man for those days, 
and he had taken up in Kentucky over 3,000 acres 
of land, in scattered tracts. One of these tracts he 
had set about clearing, with the help of his sons. 
Little Thomas was of course too young to handle an 
ax, but he usually went with his father and brothers 
into the clearing. One day when they were at work, 
an Indian from ambush killed Abraham Lincoln. 
The two older boys ran for help, leaving Thomas 
by his dead father. Just as the savage was seizing 
the child, the oldest boy, who had reached the cabin 
and found a rifle, shot him dead, thus saving his 
little brother from scalping or captivity. 

Thomas Lincoln told many stories of his wan- 
derings after his father's death, and of all he 
had seen and heard in Tennessee and Kentucky and 
of the trips he had made down the Ohio to the Mis- 
sissippi and so on down to New Orleans. He had 
many thrilling stories of hunting to tell them, for he 
was a splendid shot, and of mighty fights with quar- 
relsome bullies, in all of which he was victorious. 

He talked to the children, no doubt, of their coun- 
try, the United States, which had declared its inde- 
pendence only thirty-three years before Abraham 
Lincoln was born. He told them what he knew of 



8 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

their Virginia relatives who had fought In the Rev- 
olution, what he knew of George Washington and 
what he had seen and heard of the attempt of Aaron 
Burr and his friends to seize Texas and set up a 
kingdom, in which he hoped some day to include 
even the very State of Kentucky. 

There were great tales to tell around the fire in 
those days of the things the pioneer and his friends 
had seen and of which they had been a part. 

When young Abraham Lincoln was seven years 
old, his first venture in pioneer traveling came. His 
father was disappointed with his life on Knob Creek, 
and thought that he might improve his chances by 
moving north into the territory of Indiana, which 
was expected soon to become a State. One of his 
half brothers, Josiah Lincoln, had already settled 
in Indiana, and a visit to him had convinced Thomas 
Lincoln that he would do well to try his fortune 
there. So, in 1816, he began his preparations to 
move by building a flatboat and by selling his title 
to the land on Knob Creek, taking in exchange a 
little money and a large amount of produce that he 
hoped to be able to sell as he traveled. 

Late in the summer, Abraham and Austin had the 
excitement of seeing this boat loaded and launched 
on the Rolling Fork, and of watching Thomas Lin- 
coln float out of sight on his journey. 

When he returned, several weeks later, he had 
a fine story of adventure to tell. His journey had 
been safe until he reached the Ohio River, where, 
almost at once, he was caught in the tides and 
swamped. With a great deal of hard work, he 



A Pioneer Boy 9 

righted his boat, rescued his hogsheads and his tools 
and made his way across the river, finally landing 
near the town of Troy, Indiana. 

Here he stored the freight he had saved, sold his 
boat, and started northwest afoot into what is now 
known as Spencer County. He told them that after 
traveling about sixteen miles he had come upon a 
beautiful piece of rolling land, heavily wooded with 
hickory, oak, walnut, and sugar maples — trees so 
old and large that they had in many places crowded 
out underbrush, making an open forest, fit for graz- 
ing. He told them how this land lay between the 
forks of a big creek, known as Pigeon Creek, along 
the banks of which were many openings or prairies. 
He described how he had marked off a quarter sec- 
tion by cutting brush at the corners and burning 
them, to indicate that the land had been taken, and 
then how, to legalize this preemption, he had walked 
still farther west to Vincennes, where the land of- 
fice of Indiana was then located, and had entered 
his claim. Now he was back and they were to start 
at once for their new home. 

There was a great bustle of packing, in which 
the children, of course, took their part. They 
helped load all the family possessions — feather 
beds, coverlets, furniture, the Dutch oven, pots and 
skillets and the plow, into a wagon. Finally, when 
all was ready, the sad part came, the saying of good- 
bys — Abraham to his friend Austin, and, saddest of 
all, a visit with their mother to the grave of a baby 
brother who had died only a few months before. 

The journey northward was full of joy and in- 



10 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

terest for the children. They camped at night in 
strange and beautiful places. They crossed the 
great river, team and all, on a ferry. The river 
must have seemed lilce a sea to the children. Land- 
ing on the other side, they took up their route 
through an almost unbroken wilderness. Only a 
bridle path ran through this part of the country. 
They had to cut their road as they went. 

It was in October when they reached their new 
land and went about making a shelter which would 
do them until they could build a home. Of course 
the most important matter was to choose a proper 
site, one with good drainage and abundant water. 

The place where the Lincolns settled, while it 
would be called flat by those accustomed to high 
hills and mountains, was a rolling land, and they 
chose a beautiful, well-drained knoll for their home. 
Unfortunately, they discovered after their clearing 
was made that there was no permanent supply of 
water near. One of the tragedies of this new home 
was the fact that they never succeeded in getting a 
good well, although Thomas Lincoln exhausted him- 
self in the search, digging in all directions. There 
were seasons in the year when young Abraham and 
his sister were obliged to carry water for at least a 
mile. 

On the southwest slope of this knoll they made 
their camp. It was what the woodsman knows as 
a half-faced camp. Two strong, straight trees 
about fourteen feet apart, standing to the east and 
west, were chosen and trimmed and hewn to serve 
as corner posts. The east, west, and north sides 



A Pioneer Boy 1 1 

were then inclosed in log-cabin fashion, a lighter 
timber being cut than for a permanent building. 
These sides were made tight with clay, the roof with 
sod and branches of trees. There was no chimney 
in the half-faced camp, but in front on the open 
south side a big fireplace was made, and here a fire 
was kept burning night and day, whatever the 
weather, as a guard against prowling wolves, bears, 
and wild cats. 

Most of the cooking was done in what was known 
as a Dutch oven, a large iron pot, standing on three 
long legs and furnished with an iron cover and a 
handle. A big bed of coals was raked in front of 
the high pile of logs which were always burning 
in the fireplace, and on these the pot was placed. 
No better cooking utensil was ever devised for stew 
or roast than the Dutch oven, but you must have 
a bed of coals such as only a fireplace will give. 

A half-faced camp can be made livable, even in 
winter, except under two conditions — when a south 
wind blows the smoke into the shelter and when a 
drenching rain soaks everything, inside and out. 
Then camp life becomes a test of courage and cheer- 
fulness. Before the winter was over the Lincoln 
family often underwent this test. 

A shelter provided, the next task was to clear 
land enough for the next season's crop, cut a boun- 
tiful supply of wood, build a smokehouse and a camp 
for their few animals, and begin preparing the tim- 
ber for the permanent home, which they hoped to 
build at once. Of course, while this was going on, 
they had to keep themselves in food. This was not 



12 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

difficult. The forest around them was full of wild 
fruits and nuts and of all kinds of game — ducks, 
geese, turkeys, grouse, quail, pheasants. Not far 
away was a "deer lick," long famous in the coun- 
try. Tom Lincoln was so good a shot that the 
smokehouse was always hung with hams and shoul- 
ders of bear and venison. 

In all the work Abraham took his part. The ax 
was put into his hands as soon as they arrived in 
Indiana, and he was so strong and so willing that 
he was soon able to swing it with skill. It was only 
from hunting that he held back. He had no taste 
for killing things. Just before he was eight years 
old he shot his first turkey — and it was his last. He 
never shot deer or bear, though he always took his 
part in guarding family and neighbor when there 
was danger from prowling wolves. But if he did 
not kill, he did know how to skin and butcher ani- 
mals. Curing and tanning the hides of the bear and 
deer and wolf they took was almost as important 
to the family as the meat, for it was from these skins 
that a large part of their clothing, as well as bed 
and floor coverings, were made. 

Abraham Lincoln was a grown boy before he had 
other trousers than those made from buckskin — most 
of which he had no doubt prepared himself. His 
cap was fashioned from a coonskin, the tail hang- 
ing down behind; and as for his shoes, they were 
like the Indians' mocassins, made of hides. 

By the end of the first year their permanent home 
was ready — a generous log cabin with loft, big fire- 
place, windows, and doors. Into this went the fur- 



A Pioneer Boy 13 

nishings which at odd times Thomas Lincoln had 
been making. He was not only a fairly good car- 
penter, but a cabinetmaker as well, and out of the 
timber which he had hewn he made stools, tables, 
beds — the kind of furnishings which men, thrown 
Robinson Crusoe-like into the woods, provide for 
their needs. 

Hardly had they moved out of their half-faced 
camp into the new home when an aunt and uncle 
of the children from Kentucky moved into it — Betsy 
and Thomas Sparrow. They brought with them 
a grandson, a boy some ten years older than Abra- 
ham, Dennis Hanks. 

The coming of the Sparrows was a great comfort 
to the Lincolns, for it means company close at hand. 
Betsy was a sister of Nancy Lincoln, and the two 
women were glad to be together. Uncle Thomas 
and Dennis were two more pairs of strong arms to 
help Thomas Lincoln in settling, and Dennis was 
a lively and congenial companion for the children. 

The second winter in Indiana was much more 
cheerful and comfortable than the first had been, 
and life for the Lincolns would have continued to 
improve if a few months later, in the spring of 18 18, 
Mr. and Mrs. Sparrow had not fallen ill and died 
of a malignant malarial fever, which was ravaging 
Spencer County. People called this disease the 
"milk sick," because it was popularly supposed to 
be caused by the milch cows eating poisonous herbs. 
As medicines and doctors were almost unknown, 
the illness which, properly cared for, might have 
been cured, was usually fatal. 



14 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

Hardly were Uncle Thomas and Aunt Betsy In 
their graves when Mrs. Lincoln was taken away by 
the same disease. Poor Nancy and Abraham! It 
was a sorry day for them when they walked behind 
the green pine box which their father had made for 
their mother's coffin and saw her buried on a wooded 
knoll, only a half mile from their home. 

It was a dismal funeral, for there was no min- 
ister to read the Scriptures or say a prayer. Only 
a few neighbors were there, and some of them had 
recently been bereaved in the same way. Among 
these were two boys, schoolmates of Abraham, 
whose mother, a friend of Mrs. Lincoln, had died 
only a few days before. 

Abraham could not get over the grief of having 
his mother buried without a funeral service, and 
months later, a minister being in the vicinity, it was 
by his request that services were finally held over 
the little grave of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. 

The winter following all this grief was a hard 
one for the children. Sarah Lincoln was only eleven 
years old, and there was too much hard work 
for a child of her age. There were only a few 
neighbors, all at a distance and all heavily burdened 
by work and by illness. After a year Thomas Lin- 
coln decided that he ought to seek another mother 
for his children, and, returning to Kentucky, he 
asked a woman whom he had known as a girl, Sarah 
Bush Johnston, now a widow with three children, to 
be his wife. 

It was a great day for Sarah and Abraham Lin- 
coln when their new mother arrived. She brought 



A Pioneer Boy 1$ 

with her a big load of better furniture than they had 
ever seen and many a comfort which they had not 
known. If they had had any dread of a stepmother, 
it passed at once. She took the two children as 
her own and made them a tender and careful mother. 
Abraham came to love her as he had loved his 
own mother. 

From this time not only life at home was happier, 
but things were much more promising without. 
There was a little more land cleared every year and 
put into crops. Their stock increased. Opportu- 
nities for carpenter and cabinet work were multi- 
plying, for Indiana had been admitted into the 
Union soon after the Lincolns settled in Spencer 
County, and the valley of Pigeon Creek was filling 
up with settlers. A town, Gentryville, had sprung 
up only a mile and a half away. This meant soci- 
ety, and it meant work. In the good way of the 
pioneer, they helped the newcomers clear their land, 
dig wells, and build houses. Much of the furniture 
of the valley was made by Thomas Lincoln — chests 
of drawers, corner cupboards, stools, tables, spin- 
ning wheels. The community had grown so fast 
that when Abraham was eleven years old, a church 
was built under the direction of his father. In all 
of this work Abraham helped; indeed, before he was 
eighteen years old he was able not only to handle an 
ax but all kinds of tools, even independently of his 
father's direction. 

But it was not only at home, on the farm and in 
the carpenter shop that he worked. His father 
hired him out to various neighbors. In one family, 



1 6 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

the Crawfords, he spent several months. Every- 
where that he went to live, he became a favorite, for 
not only was he a strong and willing worker, doing 
his part cheerfully, but he was most helpful about 
the house. He might be tired by a hard day 
in the fields, but his quick eye saw an empty wood- 
box or water pail, and he quickly filled it. Many 
a tired woman in a family where he worked had 
him to thank for a "lift." Much he might easily 
have shirked if his spirit had not been so kindly, his 
desire to lend a hand where it was needed so constant 
and natural. It was not a kind deed a day with him; 
it was a kind deed whenever there was a chance for 
one — and he had an eye for the chance. 

He was not kind to his friends alone. Any one 
in trouble, anything suffering, was sure of his help 
and championship. Many of his companions were 
cruel to animals; he would not allow it. He would 
lecture them, even fight them, to stop it. Anything 
that was helpless he would champion. There was 
a good deal of drunkenness in the country , and 
people were often hard-hearted toward men who 
had drunk themselves helpless and insensible. One 
night, when young Lincoln and some of his friends 
were going home after spending the evening in their 
nearest town, Gentryville, they passed a man, drunk 
to insensibility in the road. They could not arouse 
him and Abraham's companions decided to let him 
lie where he was — good enough for him, was their 
idea. The night was cold, and the man, if he had 
not frozen to death, would certainly have suffered 
from his exposure. Lincoln refused to go on, and, 



A Pioneer Boy 17 

taking the man In his big arms, carried him a long 
distance to a cabin, where he helped build a fire and 
restore the half-frozen wretch. Such acts of kind- 
ness gave him a great reputation in the neighbor- 
hood. People not only admired his strength, but 
they admired still more his kindness. He was 
"clever," they said. 

People liked him, too, because he was "good com- 
pany." He loved to talk, to tell stories, to discuss, 
to play games. Wherever he went he brightened 
things, made them more interesting. His father 
had always been a famous story-teller and Abraham 
was like him. He remembered all the stories he 
heard and told them with pantomime and mimicry 
that set everybody into shouts of laughter. He took 
his part in all the games they played — particularly 
did he like the spelling match, the debate, and the 
exhibitions in school. He loved to run races, to 
wrestle, to swim, to jump, play slap jack, town ball, 
I spy, to pitch horseshoes, to hurl a hammer or a 
maul. Whatever the game — spelling or wrestling, 
debating or lifting weights, he excelled. 

In all these contests, he played square. There is 
only one story told of him in which his fairness can 
be questioned, and several of his old friends who saw 
the fight — for it was a fight — always defended what 
he did. Lincoln and one of his friends, William 
Grigsby, fell into a dispute over a pup which both 
boys claimed and which, as a matter of fact, had been 
given Lincoln. Grigsby angrily dared Lincoln to 
fight him. 

"I can lick, Bill, so what's the use fighting?" Lin- 



1 8 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

coin said, but Grigsby insisted and finally Lincoln 
proposed to put his stepbrother, John Johnston, in 
his place, it being understood that the pup went to 
the winner. Grigsby and Johnston went to it, but 
when Lincoln saw that his substitute was getting 
the worst of it, he suddenly seized Grigsby by the 
collar and the seat of his trousers and threw him over 
the heads of the crowd that had collected I 

The defense his friends made for his action was 
that Grigsby knew the dog belonged to Lincoln when 
he claimed it. 

His love of fun and of talk often interfered with 
work. 

"When Abe started fooling," one of his old 
friends said, "the boys would throw down their tools 
and join him, and so they would when he started 
talking." The only real trouble that Thomas Lin- 
coln had with his son was keeping him steadily at his 
tasks. And this was the only complaint of those for 
whom he worked. He had one task with which this 
propensity never interfered, and that was going to 
the mill. Flour and meal were not bought at the 
store in those days as now. The pioneer raised 
his own corn and wheat and sent it at intervals to 
be ground. It was generally an all-day task, for 
the mills were at some distance and you must await 
your turn when you arrived, and the process was 
slow. The grain was put between two heavy round 
millstones and to these were attached a long pole 
or sweep which was turned by the horse which had 
brought the grain. 

Of course the waiting for his turn gave young 



A Pioneer Boy 19 

Lincoln a fine time for talk and fun. One of the 
most curious experiences of his boyhood and one of 
which he often talked when he grew up came to him 
while grinding corn. He was urging the horse to a 
quicker pace, and started to say, "Get up, you old 
hussy," when the horse kicked him, knocking him 
unconscious in the middle of his sentence. His com- 
panion could not bring him to, and, frightened, ran 
for help. It was some hours before he regained 
consciousness, and when he came to himself he called 
out the end of the sentence which which had been 
broken by the kick of the horse — "you old hussy." 
Mr. Lincoln used often to wonder how it could be 
that his mind, after hours of what was called com- 
plete unconsciousness, could take up its work at the 
very point where it had dropped it. 

People not only liked but they trusted him. He 
never lied, never tried to shirk the blame for a mis- 
take. Over the door of the little log school on 
Pigeon Creek a fine pair of antlers were fastened. 
One day Lincoln carelessly seized one of the prongs 
and attempted to swing back and forth from it. His 
weight was too much and it broke with him. When 
the teacher came in he was very angry and demanded 
to know who had broken the antlers. Lincoln did 
not hesitate. "I did," he confessed. "I did not 
mean to do it, but I hung on it and it broke. I 
wouldn't have done it if I'd thought it'd a broke." 

As time went on and Abraham grew older and 
stronger, work outside of Pigeon Creek Valley was 
offered him. The winter he was seventeen he passed 
in the settlement at the mouth of Anderson Creek 



20 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

where it flows Into the Ohio — a place near where 
he and his father had landed in 1816 — running a 
ferry across the great river. 

Keeping the ferry meant that Abraham saw all 
the new settlers coming into Indiana by this route, 
and heard their stories and their discussions. He 
talked with men and women going to the north and 
south on visits and business, with traveling preachers, 

B-ACfilMILB OF LINES FROM tiNCOLN'S COPT BOOK. 

teachers and politicians; and of course he learned 
all about the river traffic of the Ohio. 

The Ohio was the highway of Indiana and all the 
neighboring States. It was by it the settlers received 
their news and their goods, and it was by it they 
sent out the produce they raised. Every description 
of boat known at that time could be seen on the 
river. Great flatboats loaded with produce, floating 
down to New Orleans, passed. Trading boats, car- 
rying furniture, groceries, clothes, harness, wagons, 
plows, kitchen utensils — everything that the general- 
store keepers of the settlements dealt in — tied up 



A Pioneer Boy 21 

for business. "Arks" and "Sleds" — a primitive kind 
of houseboat made by building a small cabin on a 
flatboat, with families on their decks, the women 
cooking or washing or sewing, the children playing 
beside them — floated by. And now and then came a 
steamboat. The first was seen on the Ohio River 
when Abraham was only three years old, but by this 
time, 1826, there were many of them. 

The river life fascinated young Lincoln. Why 
should he not go to New Orleans, too? Other boys 
did. Boys no older than he went with produce they 
had raised themselves. In his leisure time he put 
in a piece of tobacco not far from the ferry. He 
went back home with the idea buzzing In his mind, 
and began working with all his might to raise enough 
potatoes, corn, and bacon to justify an expedition. 
His father and mother were doubtful about the un- 
dertaking. They naturally feared some harm might 
come to him, but he was so eager and worked so 
hard that they finally consented. 

When his produce was ready, Abraham went to 
Anderson's ferry and built a flatboat — not very 
large, but sufficient for what he had to carry. While 
he was working on this boat one day, and wondering 
if it were stanch enough for the trip, two strangers 
rode down to the river bank and hired him to take 
them out with their luggage to a passing steamer — 
there were no wharves at the small river towns in 
those days, so that passengers rowed out, the steamer 
stopping when hailed. He sculled them out, and 
they jumped on board without paying him. 

"You have forgotten to pay me," he called after 



22 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

them. They had forgotten, and each man threw 
him a silver half dollar. He could scarcely believe 
his eyes. Never before had he earned half that 
much in a day, and even then it went to his father. 
But this was his. It put hope into him and it made 
him thoughtful. If money was to be earned by 
being on hand when and where people needed help, 
he proposed to earn more. 

Whether Abraham took this flatboat that he had 
built to New Orleans or not, we do not know. It is 
quite possible that he gave up this trip because he 
had an opportunity to go about this time as a hand 
with one of his acquaintances, an older man, who was 
making the trip on a much larger boat than he could 
have possibly built. A little later, too, he went down 
the river to New Orleans on a journey of which he 
often talked when he grew to be a man. This trip 
was made as a "bow hand" on a trading boat that 
Mr. Gentry, the leading citizen of Gentryville, was 
sending down, in care of his own son, and he hired 
Abraham to go along for eight dollars a month and 
his passage back. 

To take a flatboat as large as that the Gentrys 
built down the Ohio and the Mississippi was a task 
that called for both brains and muscle. The boat 
was fully forty feet in length, with a double bottom 
of stout oak planks. It had a rough shelter on the 
deck. It was provided with two pairs of stout long 
oars at bow and stern, a check post and coil of rope, 
and what was called a setting pole for steering. The 
current of the river would carry such a boat as this 
from four to six miles an hour. The crew's work 



A Pioneer Boy 23 

was largely piloting. There were many bends in 
the river, the winds were capricious and the currents 
tricky, and in many places the traffic crowded. It 
called for skillful steering. They traded as they 
traveled, tying up wherever they thought there was a 
chance for a market, exchanging their boat's load 
of bacon, potatoes, and cloth for cotton, tobacco, and 
sugar. 

The boys spent a little time sight-seeing In New 
Orleans, disposed of their boat, and came back by 
steamer. Going to Europe nowadays would not 
have meant more to a boy than these trips to New 
Orleans did to Abraham Lincoln. When he came 
back to take up his tasks on the farm and at the car- 
penter's bench he had more to think and talk about 
than ever before in his life. 

The river was the great world to him and he was 
eager to follow it. The greatest man on the river, 
as he had seen him, was the pilot. Why should he 
not be a pilot? He talked it over with an older 
friend in whom he had confidence, and it was only 
at his insistence that he gave up the dream. His 
friend believed that it was Abraham's duty to stay 
with his father until he was twenty-one, so reluctantly 
he gave up his ambition to be a river pilot and re- 
mained at home until he was of age. 

For twenty-one years his life was almost en- 
tirely that of a laborer. What did he learn from 
this hard pioneer work? He knew how to swing 
an ax as well as any man in the West, to select and 
prepare trees for cabins and rails and timber. He 
could use tools, and plan and build. He could 



24 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

handle a horse, a plow, a scythe, a flail — could build 
and steer a flatboat. His eye was keen for every 
moving thing. He could see a hundred sights that 
none but the woodsman ever sees. He knew the 
ways of bears and deer, partridges and pheasants, 
the songs of scores of birds. He was weather-wise 
and weather-hardened, he had known cold and hun- 
ger and weariness. It had seasoned and trained him 
until he could lift a weight, run a race, and wrestle 
with any man in all the country. 

He knew men by constant association with 
them, laboring by their side in clearing land, in 
building, planting, harvesting, and trading. He 
had learned to get on with people — people of all 
sorts — stupid, quarrelsome, cowardly. He had 
learned to make himself first among people by 
kindness, courage, helpfulness, cheerfulness, hon- 
esty, loyalty. 

He had learned the meaning of labor. He saw 
that it was by labor that new lands are opened; men 
and women fed, clothed, and sheltered, homes made 
possible, cities built, a country made great. He 
saw that all progress and happiness come from 
man's power to labor, and he learned to despise the 
man that did not do his part in carrying out this 
law of God and man. 

He was a man, every inch of him, by the time 
he was twenty-one, the kind of man that the pioneer 
understands and admires. But there was another 
side to Abraham Lincoln at twenty-one that few of 
those about him understood. It was something that 
made them say sometimes that he was "different" 



A Pioneer Boy 25 

from the rest of them. For in these years, while 
he was learning the life of the laborer and practic- 
ing it, shoulder to shoulder, with his elders as well 
as with those of his own age, he had been carrying 
on another life, a life in his mind. The activities 
of this mind life of his had been as constant as the 
activities of his physical life. It had had as many 
handicaps and as many hardships, and just as the life 
of the pioneer which he had known had had a definite 
goal — the settling and the development of the coun- 
try, so Abraham Lincoln had had in the life of his 
mind a goal. He wanted to understand things — 
to know what was in books. He wanted to be able 
to explain what he had learned to others, to persuade 
and move them. Quite as early as the day when the 
ax had been put into his hand, he had had this ambi- 
tion. He had never given it up any more than he 
had been allowed to give up the ax. How far had 
he gone by this time in this mind life? How had 
he been able, laboring by day as he did, to carry it 
on? How far was he on his way toward being an 
educated man, a man of influence with other men? 



CHAPTER II 

HE FINDS HIS KINGDOM 

My mind to me a kingdom is. 

Edward Dyer. 

DID you ever hear of a "blab" school? That 
is what the settlers of southwestern Indiana 
called the school that Abraham Lincoln at- 
tended when he was a boy. If you had lived there 
you could not have passed the log schoolhouse with- 
out knowing that the name fitted, for as you ap- 
proached you would have heard a steady hum of 
voices, growing louder as you passed by, which you 
would have known could only have come from every- 
body talking together. And so it was. The pupils 
were studying out loud. There were so few books 
that the teacher was obliged to read each lesson 
aloud and the boys and girls repeated it after him. 
It is probable that Abraham Lincoln never owned a 
schoolbook in those days. The habit he learned 
in the "blab" school stayed with him, for all his life 
he loved to read aloud, and when he was preparing 
a speech he would repeat over and over the argument 
and struggle with sentences until he had them in a 
form where they sounded right. 

The schools were as poor in furniture and conve- 
niences as in books. Everything that the pupils used 
26 



He Finds His Kingdom 27 

was homemade. The benches were made of 
puncheons, set in rough logs, so were the tables. 
And as for blackboards, globes, reference books, 
and pictures — there were none. The only branches 
that the teachers attempted were reading, writing, 
and arithmetic. 

But this poverty of books and furniture did not 
prevent the schools being full of life and variety. If 
they had little they made much of what they had. 
There might be but one reader, but it was packed 
with interesting selections, meant not only to give a 
good vocabulary but to teach history, natural science, 
geography, as well as to arouse a love of generous 
actions and a contempt for meanness and injustice. 
Many of the selections chosen dealt with the men 
that had formed the United States and with their 
hopes that in this new land there would be freedom 
and a chance for all that were oppressed. 

The very problems in the arithmetic often aimed 
to teach facts about the country, as those given 
Abraham when he was studying subtraction : 

"General Washington was born in 1732. What 
is his age in 1787?" 

"America was discovered by Columbus in 1492 
and its independence declared in 1776. How many 
years elapsed between these events?" 

Having no books, and eager to have copies of the 
examples given out, Abraham made himself copy- 
books by fastening together sheets of paper. 

Much was made of spelling in the pioneer schools, 
the pupils choosing sides and spelling down almost 
every day. One of the excitements of the neighbor- 



28 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

hood was the public spelling bee. Lincoln was so 
much better speller than most of his friends that the 
side which had him for a leader at these bees nearly 
always won. Indeed, finally, he was ruled out of the 
contests entirely because of his superior accuracy. 
This did not prevent his giving a hint to his friends 
sometimes when they were puzzled over a word. 

One of his little girl friends told as long as she 
lived how once when she was hesitating whether 
defied was spelled fi, fy or fe, she looked at Lincoln 
and he put his finger to his eye. She took the hint 
and spelled the word. In spite of this early reputa- 
tion, Lincoln never was an accurate speller. He 
knew this himself. Once a boy who had been taken 
by his father to call on Mr. Lincoln in the White 
House heard the President tell how his secretaries 
had trouble with him because he rarely spelt very 
right; he made it verry. The boy never forgot hear- 
ing a President of the United States confess that 
there were words that he could not spell. 

Another important event in the "blab" school, to 
which all the neighborhood flocked, were the debates. 
One subject which always brought out a heated argu- 
ment in which the fathers and mothers of the chil- 
dren took a keen interest, was, "Which has the most 
to complain of, the Indian or the negro?" 

Besides the spelling bee and the debate, the schools 
held what they called exhibitions, generally at the 
end of the term. All the pupils were expected to 
perform, either speaking pieces or taking parts in 
dialogues. In these exercises, as in the spelling and 
debating, Lincoln excelled. He loved to speak, and 



He Finds His Kingdom 29 

as his memory was good and his ideas of the mean- 
ing of the piece clear, he nearly always aroused his 
audience to enthusiasm by his rendering. ^ 

But Lincoln did not have many terms at even the 
"blab" schools. All the days that he passed inside 
of a school house do not amount to more than a year. 
There were a few weeks in Kentucky before he was 
eight years old and short periods after he moved into 
Indiana; one when he was ten, another when he 
was fourteen, and the last and shortest when he was 
seventeen. 

Abraham realized that he would certainly forget 
what he learned in these broken terms unless he con- 
stantly put it in practice. Nothing slips away from 
one like unused knowledge. He was determined not 
to let anything escape, and he worked out his own 
system of saving his learning. He would lie on the 
floor at night before the open fire and on the back 
of the big wooden shovel, with a piece of charred 
wood, use the multiplication table on problems which 
he made up; and when the shovel was covered, he 
would pare off the surface with a sharp knife and 
begin again. Nor did he allow himself to forget 
the pieces which he had learned in school, often de- 
claiming them before his parents and their visitors. 

Abraham not only saved what he had learned in 
school ; he found ways of adding to it. He discov- 
ered when he was still very young that everybody 
about him knew something that he did not know, and 
that by listening and asking questions of others he 
could learn things that could not always be found 
in books, certainly not in books that he had. His 



30 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

curiosity about what was going on in the world, about 
what people were doing and how they were doing 
it, what they thought and why they thought it, was 
so great that he rarely met a stranger that he did 
not try to learn from him. He would leave his work 
— to the disgust of his father or employer — when a 
stranger passed on the road, and ask questions. 

One of the places where he learned most from 
others was the general store at Gentryville, kept by 
William Jones. It was the custom on mail day, Sat- 
urday afternoons, rainy days, and almost every even- 
ing, for the men and boys in and around Gentryville, 
to gather in Mr. Jones' store. They talked of the 
weather, of the crops, and of all the joys and trag- 
edies of the countryside. They listened to everybody 
who had come back from a trip down the river and 
to every visitor that had come from the East or the 
South. Chiefly, they discussed politics. The mail 
came once a week, by a carrier from Rockport. He 
brought the one regular paper, a weekly, the Louis- 
ville Journal. 

Lincoln was so good a reader that he was often 
asked to read articles to the company. And then 
came the discussion. There were great questions to 
discuss, too, and Lincoln always went home with his 
mind full of new thoughts and new information after 
an evening spent in Jones' store. 

His habit of watching what went on around him 
and of asking questions when he was puzzled, served 
him well when he was a ferryman and on his trips 
down the Mississippi. What a boy gets out of hikes 
and travel depends upon how good a use he makes 



He Finds His Kingdom 31 

of his eyes and his tongue, upon his ability to see 
things as they are and to ask wise, not foolish, ques- 
tions. Lincoln could make a trip on foot to Rock- 
port, fifteen miles from his home, and come back 
with more information and new ideas than a boy 
who had not his trained faculty for seeing and listen- 
ing would bring back from a trip to Europe. 

He was not only a listener and an observer; he had 
discovered when a very little fellow that stories of 
what men thought and had done could be found in 
books. It was the Bible which first taught him this. 
It was difficult to get Bibles in those days. When 
the colonies first quarreled with England, they put 
an embargo on all imports. As there was neither 
paper nor type enough in the country to print Bibles, 
there was soon such a dearth of them that in 1777 
Congress ordered the purchase of 20,000 in Hol- 
land. When the war was over, cheap Bibles came 
in again from England, and were scattered over the 
country where they were needed most. It was one 
of these English Bibles that came into Thomas Lin- 
coln's household. Abraham's education was founded 
on this book. He knew much of it by heart. He was 
familiar with the lives of the men that it tells about, 
he thoroughly absorbed its wonderful teachings, and 
even as a boy he tried to model his conduct upon 
them. 

For a number of years this Bible was the only 
book he had at home, but he was so eager to read 
that he always was on the lookout for books in other 
people's houses. Wherever he heard of a book, any- 
where within twenty miles, he could not rest until he 



32 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

had borrowed it; he would keep it in his pocket and 
read it whenever he had a spare moment. Much as 
he enjoyed talking and playing games at noontime 
when he was working with a number of boys, if he 
had a book he would go off by himself and read; and 
at night, after he had his supper, he would go to his 
room and read as long as there was light. Before 
returning a borrowed book he would often make 
long extracts of the passages that had interested him 
most — not so simple a thing for a boy to do that in 
those days. Lincoln had not only to save paper and 
sew it together for a copybook, but he had to cut 
his pen from turkey quills and make his ink from 
brier root. 

The winter that he spent at the mouth of Ander- 
son's Creek, running the ferry, he lived in a house 
where there were many books, most of them new to 
him, and the family were surprised to find that he 
spent his night, as well as his little leisure in the day- 
time, reading. 

One of the most serious difficulties that he had as 
a boy came from being not as careful as he should 
have been of a book he had borrowed. It was 
Weems's "Life of Washington." Lincoln was fas- 
cinated with the story of Washington's goodness and 
greatness and his services to the country, and he read 
and re-read the volume. One night he left it in a 
crack between two logs of the cabin. A rainstorm 
came up while he was asleep and the book was 
soaked. The owner was Josiah Crawford, a neigh- 
bor near Gentryville, and Lincoln went at once to 
him and showed him what had happened. Mr. 



He Finds His Kingdom 33 

Crawford perhaps wanted to give the boy a lesson in 
carefulness, or perhaps he thought it was a chance 
to get some extra help at his work. At any rate, he 
told him that as a penalty for the injury he had 
allowed to come to the book, he must pull fodder 
for three days. As a man was paid only about thirty 
cents a day at that time and as the book was rare 
and valuable, it was not an unjust punishment. 

His hunger for books, for it can be called nothing 
else — a hunger quite as real as that one feels for 
food — and the time and trouble he gladly took to get 
them, earned him more than one useful friend. For 
instance, there was the constable in Gentryville, 
David Turnham, who owned a copy of the revised 
statutes of Indiana, which he used himself in his busi- 
ness. Lincoln was so interested in this book, which 
contained not only the laws of the State but a copy 
of the Declaration of Independence and the Consti- 
tution of the United States, that he used to go to 
Mr. Turnham's house and read there. This ac- 
quaintance grew into a friendship which lasted as 
long as Mr. Turnham lived. He always treasured 
the book which Abraham had read so often at his 
home, and years later, after the assassination, he 
gave the book to Mr. Lincoln's friend and law part- 
ner, William Herndon. It is now in New York 
City, one of the treasures of the Library of the New 
York Law Institute. 

The more Lincoln read, the more he wanted to 
read. Often he brooded over his handicaps — his 
few books — always borrowed and never his own — 
the difficulty of finding time to read when he must 



34 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

work from sunrise to sunset six days in the week — 
the lack of companions interested like himself. It 
was hard, lonely work educating himself. He seems 
never to have allowed his discouragement to get the 
better of him. However hard things were, he stuck 
to his determination to know and to understand. In 
his ambition he was fortunate in having the help and 
sympathy of his stepmother. When his father 
fretted because the boy "wasted" so much time read- 
ing, she defended him. She loved to talk over with 
him what he had read and sought in every way she 
could to make it easier for him to find time and 
materials for study. 

The more he read and studied, the more he 
learned about using his mind. He began to see that 
it was not the number of books he read that mat- 
tered, that it was the mastery of what was in them. 
He discovered that when he had laid aside a book 
for the ax or plow or hammer, he could still use his 
mind on its contents, make sure that he understood 
it fully. 

To be certain that he really understood was one 
of his great desires. He had no patience with slov- 
enly thinking. When he was a very little boy, if he 
heard people talking about things which he did not 
understand, he would sometimes lie awake half the 
night trying to figure them out. He was never satis- 
fied until he had a thing clear in his mind. He strug- 
gled a long time to understand the relation of the 
earth to the sun and the moon. Finally, he had it so 
clearly fixed in his mind that he could make his com- 
panions understand it. A little girl friend used to 



He Finds His Kingdom 35 

tell when she was a grown woman how one day she 
said to Abraham, "The moon is going down." And 
he replied, "No, it is not going down, but we — the 
earth, are going down;" and then went on and ex- 
plained the revolution of the earth on its axis, and 
its course around the sun 

He soon discovered that the more clearly he ex- 
plained to others the more fully he understood him- 
self and the more firmly facts and ideas were fixed 
in his mind. Whenever he could find anybody to 
listen to him he would go over what he had read. 
As he grew older he often had an audience of men 
as well as boys listening to his serious speeches and 
discussions. 

This training which he was giving both his wits 
and his tongue served him in more than one tight 
place as he was growing to manhood. The winter 
he kept the ferry at Anderson's Creek, he was even 
able to make a successful plea in his own defense 
when brought before a local justice of the peace on 
a serious enough charge. It happened in this way: 

Two farmers kept the ferry across the river on 
the Kentucky side. As there were only occasional 
travelers, it was the practice, when any one wanted 
to cross from one side to the other, to ring a bell for 
the ferryman. The farmers on the Kentucky side 
were busy men and frequently did not respond 
promptly. Lincoln fell into the habit, when the de- 
lay was long, of pushing out from his side of the 
river and picking up the traveler, and, of course, re- 
ceiving the fee for carrying him over. This hap- 
pened so often that the Kentucky ferrymen began 



36 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

to suspect that Lincoln was trying to steal their 
trade and decided to trap him. One day, when they 
had not answered the bell and he had finally crossed, 
they waylaid him, took him before the squire, and 
made their charge. 

Lincoln saw at once that the case was serious. 
Unless he could defend himself it meant a jail sen- 
tence. So, when the squire asked him for his de- 
fense, he made it frankly and persuasively. He had 
had no idea, he claimed, that in crossing the river he 
was doing anything but a favor to the Kentucky 
ferrymen. He knew that they were busy and did not 
like to leave their work. He knew that the travelers 
ought not to be kept waiting overlong. He thought 
that he was accommodating every one concerned 
when he took the men over. 

There was no mistaking his honesty, at least so 
the squire seems to have thought. Besides, his argu- 
ment was so clear and sound that the squire finally 
let him off. Not only that, the squire was so inter- 
ested in the young man that he had a long talk with 
him and invited him to come whenever he pleased 
to the trials that were held before him. 

Abraham was quick to take advantage of this Invi- 
tation. Nothing went on in southwestern Indiana 
that interested him so much as the scenes in the local 
courts. He again and again walked to Rockport, 
the county seat of Spencer County, nearly twenty 
miles from his home, to attend court. There he 
became acquainted with Judge John Pitcher, whose 
curiosity about the big, roughly dressed lad that lis- 
tened so Intently to the pleadings of the lawyers and 



He Finds His Kingdom 37 

to his own speeches, was so strong that he talked with 
him whenever he had the opportunity, advised him, 
and loaned him books. 

Another court which Lincoln frequently attended 
was that at Boonville, the county seat of Warwick 
County. It was a rather long hike, nearly fifteen 
miles, and Lincoln made it usually on foot. He even 
once went barefoot to follow a murder trial, so in- 
terested was he. 

The desire to understand everything so clearly 
that he could make others understand it, became 
more and more a passion with Lincoln as he grew 
older, and led him to something very important in 
his education, and that was, a great care about how 
he said things, about the words he used, and the sen- 
tences he constructed. He found that if his listeners 
were really to understand his arguments he must 
use words familiar to them, generally simple words ; 
that he must use phrases that were straightforward 
and clear. As his great desire was to think clearly 
himself and have others understand his thoughts, he 
became very particular, turning his phrases over and 
over until they were as intelligible as he could make 
them. 

He discovered that one way to interest, as well as 
to make people understand, was by illustrations 
drawn from things that they were familiar with, so 
he fell into the habit of explaining by stories drawn 
from the incidents of daily life. The dog gnawing 
and pulling at a root all day long in order to get at 
a woodchuck served him as a lesson in persistency; 
the sleepy, lazy horse, driven to action by the bite 



38 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

of a chin fly, served him as an illustration of the way 
an annoying or disheartening thing may drive one 
to an effort which, without it, he would not make. 
Everything in the world about him was full of mean- 
ing. It was not only that he saw things, but that he 
thought out their meaning and after he had thought 
it out he explained it whenever chance came. 

It was natural that his desire to express himself 
so that he could convince and move others should 
lead him to writing. He is known to have written an 
essay on kindness to animals and another on the 
horrors of war, subjects that not only appealed to 
his natural kindly instincts but which were often 
treated in the school readers of that time. When he 
was about nineteen, he wrote an essay on the Amer- 
ican Government and our duty to preserve the 
Union, which he submitted to his friend, Judge 
Pitcher of Rockport. Years afterward Judge 
Pitcher, talking about this essay, declared that "the 
world could not beat it." 

But it was not on serious topics only that he wrote. 
He had caught the trick of rhyming, and all of these 
early years used it freely. 

When his sister Sarah was married to Aaron 
Grigsby — the brother of that William Grigsby with 
whom he had had the dispute over the ownership of 
a dog — ^Abraham wrote a song which was sung at 
the wedding by the Lincoln family. It was the story 
of the creation of Eve from Adam's side, and ended 
with lines which, it is to be hoped, Sarah Lincoln's 
new husband remembered: 



He Finds His Kingdom 39 

"The woman was not taken 
From Adam's feet we see, 
So he must not abuse her, 
The meaning seems to be. 

"The woman was not taken 

From Adam's head, we know, 
To show she must not rule him — 
'Tis evidently so, 

"The woman she was taken 

From under Adam's arm. 
So she must be protected 
From injuries and harm." 

Lincoln's facility In rhyming always astonished his 
friends. There was nobody else in the country so 
accomplished. They could understand his strong 
arm but not his faculty of verse making, and the 
community was more impressed when it was discov- 
ered that Lincoln could use his accomplishment in 
ridiculing those who had slighted or wronged him. 
The feeling of the Grigsbys against Abraham was 
so strong, probably because of the fight over the dog, 
that they did not invite him to a wedding in the 
family, although everybody else in the neighborhood 
was there. Abraham took his revenge in verse, writ- 
ing a long string of jingles ridiculing them. It was 
a novel kind of revenge in Gentryville and probably 
cut deeper because of that. 

Lincoln had discovered a dangerous thing, that he 
could hurt people by satire and ridicule — dangerous, 
because so easily abused. A blow with the tongue 
or pen may be more cruel than a blow with the fist. 



40 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

If he had not been kind at heart, given to measuring 
all his actions by his idea of what was right and what 
was wrong, that newly discovered power might have 
proved later a cruel weapon in his hands. 

But he was kind, and felt about his skill in satire 
very much as he did about his strength of body, that 
it was something that should not be used wan- 
tonly; and in later life he learned to use it only 
when he was indignant over meanness or injus- 
tice, but then to such good effect that there was 
nothing that those who knew him dreaded more. In 
this case of the Grigsbys, whatever resentment they 
may have felt over his lampooning was forgotten, 
for, years later, when he was President of the United 
States, one of his stanchest supporters in southwest- 
ern Indiana was William Grigsby. 

Perhaps the greatest thing that he learned in his 
hard struggles to make the most of his life was to 
suit his conduct always to what he felt to be right. 
He did not believe one thing and do another. It 
could not have been easy for a boy who was so strong 
and supple that he could throw anybody that he had 
ever met, to refuse good-naturedly to fight some 
quarrelsome bully whose chief ambition was to have 
everybody afraid of him. Lincoln could afford to 
laugh at such boys. He knew his own strength, but 
he believed fighting and quarreling to be contempt- 
ible and wrong. He would have no part in them, 
unless he was literally driven to it. If, as happened 
occasionally, a gang that loved fighting for its own 
sake attacked him, they found, to their shame, that 
they were no match. There seems never to have 



He Finds His Kingdom 41 

been a boy in the community that he could not pick 
up and throw over his head; or, if forced to hit, he 
could not straighten out with one blow. But he took 
no pride in any brutal use of his strength, though he 
used it freely in helping others. If there was a log 
or a timber so heavy that no one could lift it, he 
would shoulder it. He loved to test himself, too, 
in all sorts of games, for he took pride in the supple- 
ness as well as in the strength of his body. 

He used his sense of what was right and wrong as 
one does a compass in the woods, to point his way; 
and he would no more be false to that sense of right 
and wrong than the traveler would to his compass. 
He had thought it all out and he had come to see that 
it is only by justice, kindness, honesty of mind and 
heart in dealing with people that a man can become 
useful and happy, and, as for himself, his mind was 
made up. He might never have gone to school but 
a year in his life, never had books or clothes like 
those that the well-to-do boy even in that part of the 
world in those times had, he might have to depend 
upon labor with his hands for his food and shelter; 
but this he had come to believe, that the greatest 
things in the world, greater than wealth or honor, 
were within his reach. And these were, to be loyal 
in all his relations, obedient to the law, cheerful 
whatever his hardships, and trustworthy always. 

Lincoln's steady, determined training of himself 
made a strong impression on his friends. Many of 
the older people especially watched and often said 
to one another, "He will make his mark," "He 
will be a great man by and by." 



42 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

And, indeed, that is what Lincoln intended. He 
was ambitious to know and see and be more than 
those about him. Everything that he learned showed 
him that there were men in the world who did great 
and noble things. How were they able to do them? 
He learned that they had to labor and sacrifice in 
order to be what they were, but that did not frighten 
him. All his life he had had to labor and sacrifice 
simply to get food and clothes. He began to see 
that the difference in the usefulness and in the powers 
of men comes from the fact that some of them so 
love knowledge and so desire to be useful that they 
are willing to make great efforts; while others want 
everything done for them; and he saw that these 
men who want everything done for them never be- 
came useful or important. 

He kept at his work of learning, understanding, 
and telling others so persistently that by the time he 
was twenty-one years old, although he had never 
been in school more than a year, he had an education 
which no college or university alone can give; to be 
sure, the college or university may make it much 
easier to learn these things, but they cannot do the 
work for a man, he must do it for himself. If a 
man is to have the love of knowledge he must culti- 
vate it. If he is to have an eye that sees everything 
that goes on about him, he must train it. If he is 
to have the power to think through a hard problem, 
he must acquire it by continually putting his mind 
to hard problems, never giving up anything that 
puzzles him until he has thought it through; if he 
is to be able to explain that problem to others, he 



He Finds His Kingdom 43 

must constantly exercise himself in explaining clearly 
by word and by pen. Above all, if he is to be truth- 
ful, courageous, clean, cheerful, reverent, he must 
watch himself constantly, control and shape his im- 
pulses, training his heart as he does his mind and 
body. 

Lincoln had done these things. By the time he 
was twenty-one years of age, he had learned the 
things that are most important in education, and it 
was now time for him to start out for himself. He 
did not see much chance of going further in Indiana, 
and it is probable that he would have left home of 
his own will if his father had not made up his mind 
to leave Spencer County. He had not prospered 
there as he had hoped, and that old malarial trouble 
of which Nancy Hanks Lincoln had died had broken 
out again. 

One of Abraham's cousins, John Hanks, had gone 
to Illinois, and had come back with wonderful tales 
of a land without forests to be cleared and of a soil 
that was so rich it only needed scratching to yield 
a crop. He proposed to go there and settle. The 
stories stirred all of the pioneer instinct in Tom Lin- 
coln, and he decided to follow John Hanks, so the 
Lincolns sold their land, their extra stock, and prod- 
uce, and in March of 1830, just a month after 
Lincoln was twenty-one, they started, a party of 
thirteen, on a journey into the new land. 

Everybody was sorry to see them go. It was a 
hard parting, particularly for Abraham. He had 
lived fourteen years in this valley, from the time he 
was seven until he was twenty-one. He knew every- 



44 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

body within many miles of his home, and he was on 
friendly terms with everybody. He was leaving be- 
hind scores of friends, the grave of his mother. He 
knew that in starting out for himself — which, once 
this moving was over, he must do — he must go 
among strangers ; but it was a new adventure, prom- 
ising him the chance he so eagerly awaited; besides 
he was too busy with the work of the journey to 
have time to brood. 

The goods of the family had been packed into a 
big wagon and Abraham drove the oxen which pulled 
the load, a task that required skill and attention. 
The roads, poor at best, were terrible at this season, 
half frozen in some places, full of deep holes in 
others. There were no bridges and often the heavy 
wagon broke through the soft ice which still cov- 
ered the streams. Abraham had his hands full all 
day and at evening when they camped he must care 
for his oxen and help with the horses, for most of 
the party, including Mrs. Lincoln, were on horse- 
back, each rider carrying strapped behind a great 
bundle of fodder. 

The journey led them through two good sized 
towns — Vincennes and Palestine. Lincoln saw on 
this trip his first printing press and his first juggler. 
The skill of the latter particularly amazed him. 
Here, he saw, was somebody who could do some- 
thing with his body that he could not do. He never 
lost his interest in this sort of skill, and always at 
fairs, in later life, he would go to watch the strong 
men throwing balls and performing other feats of 
jugglery. 



He Finds His Kingdom 45 

Much of the interest of the trip came from a little 
business venture that he was making on the side. 
He had foreseen that there was a chance of making 
a little extra money, so he went to his friend, Mr. 
Jones, of the general store, and asked him to make 
up a pack of things that he could peddle along the 
way. Needles, pins, thread, calico, buttons, knives 
and forks, went into his pack, and all were sold on 
the trip. 

It took two weeks for the Lincolns to reach Macon 
County, Illinois, where John Hanks had already 
selected a piece of land for them. This land lay 
about ten miles west of Decatur, the county seat, 
on a bluff overlooking the Sangamon River. There 
were acres of open prairie and much fine timber — a 
really beautiful spot. All hands fell to with energy 
to build a cabin, and this done, to split rails for a 
field. Most of these rails were split by Abraham 
himself, and thirty years later some of them were 
carried in political parades and shown in political 
conventions. 

The field fenced, the ground must be broken and 
put into crops. In all this work Lincoln helped. It 
was true he was now of age and had the right, accord- 
ing to law, to start out for himself; but this he was 
unwilling to do until he saw his father established. 
That done, he set out on a search for work, his ax 
over his shoulder, for the first time in his life a free 
and independent man. 



CHAPTER III 

STARTING OUT FOR HIMSELF 

Get work: it is better than what you work to get. 

Robert Browning. 

IF you had seen him in the summer of 1831, when 
he started out for himself, probably the last 
thing you would have believed was that Abra- 
ham Lincoln had in him the making of a great man. 
The chances are that you would have looked at his 
clothes instead of his eyes, have judged by the kind 
of work he was doing instead of finding out what 
was going on in his mind. Certainly, if you had 
seen only the outside you would not have picked him 
out as a future leader of a great country. And yet, 
to the Boy Scout, with his trained appreciation of 
strength, vigor, and suppleness, he would have been 
a remarkable figure. 

Lincoln was twenty-two years old, almost six feet 
four inches in height, and weighed nearly one hun- 
dred and eighty pounds. There was not an ounce 
of extra flesh on his body, nothing but hard, sinewy 
muscle, and if he had gripped your hand you would 
have known that he could crush it if he wished. 
Carrying his great frame erect, he walked with long, 
elastic strides, arms swinging. When sitting he 
slouched — "sat on his shoulder blades," people said; 
46 



Starting Out for Himself 47 

when reading he liked to lie at full length on the floor 
or ground. His face matched his body — a thin face, 
with high cheek bones, broad forehead, and big nose. 
There was a curious drop at one side of his lower 
lip and a big wart on his right cheek. His eyes were 
gray and his hair heavy, coarse, and black. His big 
body was clad in clothes so poor and ill fitting that 
they attracted attention even in those pioneer days. 
Usually they were made of what was called jeans, 
a cotton mixture, roughly woven at home. His 
trousers were nearly always too short and his coat 
hitched up in the back. You see, if you are given 
to judging people by their clothes, the probability is 
that you would have passed by this future President 
of the United States, 

In spite of appearance, however, from the time 
that Abraham Lincoln began to work on his own 
account, it was on the educated people, the big men 
of the community, that he made the deepest impres- 
sion. He amazed them by his knowledge, his 
thoughtfulness, his clear and forceful expression of 
ideas. They were surprised at his interest in the 
affairs of the countryside and his sensible way of 
looking at them. Almost at once he interested him- 
self in a local public question. 

Lincoln had seen, as soon as he arrived in Macon 
County, that the great need of the settlers was better 
transportation — some way to get easily to the big 
markets of the world with their produce. Now, 
close to his new home was a river, the Sangamon, 
which about one hundred and fifty miles to the west 
joined the Illinois River, some seventy miles from 



48 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln ' 

where it flowed into the Mississippi, But it was 
such a lawless, zigzag stream and so blocked by 
driftwood and snags that it had never been consid- 
ered navigable. Lincoln worked near this river for 
several months after he arrived in Illinois and, 
trained as he was to watch and think about his sur- 
roundings, studied its ways until he made up his 
mind it could be opened and that to do this was the 
first business of the settler. 

One day as he and his cousin John Hanks were 
at work with others in the fields, a candidate for 
office stopped to talk to them. He talked on the 
very subject Lincoln had been thinking about — the 
navigation of the Sangamon. When he had finished, 
John Hanks declared loudly that Lincoln could make 
a better speech than that. "Let him do it," the boys 
shouted. It must have been a surprise to them when, 
without hesitation, Abraham bounded to his feet and 
made a speech which the candidate himself admitted 
to be better than his. He knew enough of speech- 
making to understand that was not the first time the 
big rail splitter had talked on his feet. 

"Where did you learn that?" he asked him. Abra- 
ham told him modestly enough how he had read and 
tried to make all he read clear to himself and others 
by speaking when he could find listeners. "Keep 
on," the man told him, "you'll make your mark some 
day." 

It was the Sangamon River that gave him his first 
chance and soon after it gave him a second when 
he and his half brother and his cousin were hired 
to pilot a flatboat with a load of produce from near 



Starting Out for Himself 49 

Springfield to New Orleans. It was a chance to 
prove that he was right in the things that he had 
been saying about the navigation of the river. 

Early in 1831 the three young men went to Spring- 
field where they were to meet their employer. But 
they found he had not kept his agreement to have a 
boat ready and loaded for them, and that if they 
were to make the trip, they must build the boat 
themselves. 

It was work with which all three were familiar, 
and soon they were busy getting out the timber. 
There were no lumber yards to draw upon, but there 
was plenty of government land with timber for the 
asking. Going into the woods they built a camp 
and set about their task. The camp was near a set- 
tlement known as Sangamon town, and it was not 
many days before the inhabitants were telling one 
another that there was a big fellow down in the new 
camp who was a wonderful story-teller. It soon 
became the habit at noontime and in the evening for 
all the menfolks around to drift into Abraham's 
camp to listen to him talk. Their favorite seat was 
a long log, off which the men, convulsed with 
laughter, rolled so often that they soon had it pol- 
ished. It was long known in Sangamon town as 
"Abe's log." 

The boat was finished early in April and safely 
launched; but it did not get off without an exciting 
accident in which Lincoln's coolness and courage in 
danger came out strongly. 

A log canoe or dugout had been made for use with 
the flatboat and two men who had been helping the 



50 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

party attempted to launch It. The river was high, 
overflowing its banks, and they were careless. 
Hardly was the dugout in the water before over it 
went, throwing them into the cold, rushing stream. 
They were swept rapidly away by the swift current, 
but finally succeeded in reaching the branches of a 
half-submerged tree in midstream. 

How to rescue the two men, perched up above the 
roaring river, was a problem. Lincoln took the 
matter promptly in hand. Seizing the heavy ropes 
on the flatboat, he called on the whole party to help 
attach them to a big log, and shove it into the stream. 
A daring fellow was selected to guide it to the tree 
in which the men were perched. He did so, but, 
excited with his success, sprang up too quickly and 
was thrown into the water, losing the log and only 
barely reaching the tree, to which now three half- 
frozen, frightened men were clinging. 

A second log was secured and the maneuver re- 
peated, but Lincoln himself directed the life boat this 
time. He was able to bring it so near the tree that 
he could throw a line about the trunk and hold it 
secure until the prisoners had climbed down and 
seated themselves. Then, freeing his craft, he or- 
dered it pulled slowly to shore. 

By this time the whole countryside was on the 
banks watching the rescue, and when a short time 
afterward Lincoln and his friends floated away from 
Sangamon town, he went with a reputation not only 
as the best story-teller that had ever been in those 
parts, but as a fearless and resourceful hero. 

Thirty miles or so down the river, the flatboat 



Starting Out for Himself 5 1 

and its crew met with a second mishap in which Lin- 
coln was again the central figure. In an attempt to 
go over a milldam at the town of New Salem the 
boat hung, bow in air. The boxes and hogsheads 
began settling into the stern and water flowing in. It 
looked like a shipwreck and the whole neighborhood 
gathered to shout directions and warnings. Lincoln 
paid little attention to his audience, but quickly began 
unloading and shifting cargo. Part of it was sent 
ashore in the dugout, and the rest was carried for- 
ward until gradually the weight began to raise the 
stern. When the angle was changed he bored a 
hole in the bottom of the boat, letting out the water 
which had run in and was soon able to push the craft 
over. "A mighty smart chap," declared the people 
in New Salem, who had been watching operations. 
From the Sangamon they floated into the Illinois 
River and from the Illinois into the Mississippi and 
on down to New Orleans. Although Lincoln had 
made the trip at least twice before he was now much 
better prepared to benefit by what he saw and heard. 
The month he spent in New Orleans was one of the 
richest so far in his life. In 1831 the city was filled 
with people from all parts of the world, but particu- 
larly from France and Spain. There were many 
Creoles and Indians. Besides, there was a commu- 
nity of pirates and filibusters, fresh from wild and 
often wicked adventures and preparing for new ones. 
Along with these were hundreds of rivermen from 
the full length of the Mississippi. It was said that 
one could walk a mile in those days over the tops of 
the flatboats tied up along the wharves in New Or- 



52 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

leans. Lincoln lived among these rough men, heard 
their tales, and learned their ways. 

Nothing in the brilliant life of the city interested 
him so much as the slave market. It was the first 
time he had seen men and women put upon the auc- 
tion block as he had been accustomed to seeing 
horses and cows and hogs. The separation of moth- 
ers and children, husbands and wives, brothers and 
sisters filled him with angry amazement. From the 
time that he was seven years old he had lived in free 
states. Slavery was only a name to him. He had 
been taught by his father and many of his friends 
to regard it as wrong, but he had all his life heard 
men for whom he felt respect uphold it as a neces- 
sary institution. What he saw in the slave market, 
the most terrible and inhuman part of slavery — but 
a necessary part if men and women were to be con- 
sidered as property which could be bought and sold 
— filled his mind. He could not think or talk about 
anything else. "If ever I get a chance to hit that 
thing," he told his cousin, "I'll hit it hard." 

After the month in New Orleans, the travelers 
came back by steamer to Illinois. Their employer, 
a venturesome, boastful trader, who was looking for 
a chance to establish himself permanently in Illinois, 
had decided to open a store in New Salem. He 
had been so pleased with what he had seen of Lin- 
coln that he asked him to take charge of this store; 
and so, in the summer of 1832, Lincoln returned to 
the town where more than one citizen recognized him 
as the resourceful and cool fellow who, a few months 



Starting Out for Himself 53 

before, had saved a flatboat and its cargo from sink- 
ing in the Sangamon. 

But New Salem quickly discovered that Lincoln 
was as able in many other ways as he had been in 
saving his boat. He surprised them both by the 
variety of things he could do and by the kindliness 
and zest with which he did them. Just after his 
arrival an election was held in the town and the clerk 
in charge — the schoolmaster, Mentor Graham, 
needed an assistant. When anything unusual was 
going on, particularly anything that brought men 
together, Lincoln was sure to be on hand. Mentor 
Graham, seeing him in the crowd, asked him if he 
could write. "I can make a few rabbit tracks," he 
answered. It would not have been surprising if 
Graham had been a little doubtful about his capacity, 
but he tried him out, and immediately saw that here, 
in spite of his queer looks, was a young man who 
knew his business. He made the entries correctly 
and promptly and asked such intelligent questions 
and made such shrewd comments that the school- 
master was greatly taken with him. When things 
were a little dull he enlivened the crowd by telling 
stories. Before night, all New Salem was telling 
about the stranger who had dropped in, made such 
a good clerk, and illustrated his talk by the most 
amusing and striking stories that they had heard 
in many a day. 

By the time the store was open he had won the 
good will and respect of the best people in New 
Salem; soon after he won over the roughest part 



54 ^oy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

ot the community, a wild and lawless gang known 
as the Clary's Grove Boys — a name given them from 
their meeting place in a grove near the town. One 
of the ambitions of this gang was to include in its 
membership the strongest wrestlers and hardest 
fighters in the country. Their champion at this time 
was Jack Armstrong, whom they boldly declared to 
be as strong as an ox and able to lick anybody alive. 

Lincoln's employer, hearing these boasts and 
proud of his clerk's strength and skill, retorted that 
Lincoln could lift more, run faster, jump higher, 
wrestle better than any man in Sangamon County. 
Of course, the Clary's Grove Boys would not let that 
pass, and they ordered Armstrong "to throw Lin- 
coln." Abraham did not like these wrestling 
matches. There was too much "wooling and pull- 
ing" about them, he said. But it was an open 
challenge with the promise of fair play, so he con- 
sented. There was great excitement over the match, 
the community generally expecting Armstrong to 
make short work of the new man. But almost at 
once everybody saw that the champion had met his 
match. He could not throw Lincoln. Realizing 
this, after a long struggle, he tried a "foul." 

Lincoln had wrestled in good humor to this point, 
but when he realized what Armstrong was doing he 
was furious. Seizing him by the throat he held him 
at arm's length, shaking him as a dog might a rat. 
The gang, seeing their champion in this inglorious 
predicament, rushed to his assistance. For a few 
minutes it looked as if Lincoln would be downed 
by numbers, but he held them off until, amazed at 



Starting Out for Himself 55 

his strength and skill, they fell back in admiration, 
and Armstrong, ashamed of his trickery, loudly 
declared that Lincoln was the best man that had 
ever broken into camp. 

Lincoln's place was now secure with the young of 
the countryside. He was their chosen umpire in all 
sports and they heeded his warnings and took 
his advice when nobody else could influence them. 
When fall came and the regular muster of the militia 
for the drilling required by law was made, it was 
the young men that chose Lincoln for captain, just 
as their elders chose him for clerk of elections and 
referee in town matters. 

This popularity with all classes encouraged Lin- 
coln to think that his ambition to take an active part 
in public affairs might not be hopeless, after all. 
Dare he offer himself as a candidate for office? By 
this time he had become so intimate with Mentor 
Graham, the schoolmaster, that he told him of his 
ambition. The schoolmaster understood, as Lincoln 
did not, that, intelligent and thoughtful as he was, 
his lack of systematic schooling would be a serious 
handicap to him if he went into public life. "For 
one thing you must learn not only to speak well and 
fluently but speak correctly," he told him. "That 
is, you must know more than you do about the sci- 
ence of grammar." 

"I can learn it, can't I?" said Lincoln. 

"Yes," said the schoolmaster, "and I will help 
you." 

So far as Abraham could find out, there was at 
that time but one grammar to be borrowed in the 



S6 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

whole countryside, and that was some miles away. 
He did not wait, but started at once for the book; 
and for weeks after that he could be seen in every 
spare hour, working over the principles and trying 
to apply them. He did a good piece of work. There 
were only two slips which Lincoln in later life was 
wont to make and these many educated people make. 
One was to split his infinitives, and the other was 
to confuse "shall" and "will." 

He learned something by this mastery of gram- 
mar which he seems not to have fully realized be- 
fore, and that is that men arrange the knowledge 
they collect of a particular subject and the principles 
governing this knowledge which they work out into 
what is called a science, and that in order to get a 
solid basis for work in the world it is necessary to 
master at least the outlines of the essential sciences, 
that these are the foundations of an education and 
that it is through the schools that men have agreed to 
teach the elements of the necessary sciences. Lin- 
coln saw that heretofore he had been reading and 
studying without plan and although he had taught 
himself to think out and express problems clearly, 
he had little systematic knowledge. 

"If that's a science," he said when he had finished 
with grammar, "I guess I'll try another." 

While he was working on his grammar he de- 
cided to prepare an address to the people of the 
district, announcing himself as a candidate for the 
State legislature. You see, he did not intend to lose 
any time in letting people know what his ambitions 
were. He did not intend that lack of money, school- 



Starting Out for Himself 57 

Ing, or clothes should stand In his way. He went 
straight after the thing that he wanted, and in 
March, 1832, only one year after he came into the 
State, and when he was only twenty-three years old, 
he put out his announcement; but hardly was his 
bid for votes out before his and everybody's mind 
was turned from politics to war — an Indian war. 

One morning in April, a rider dashed through the 
streets of New Salem, scattering handbills signed 
by the governor, calling for volunteers to repel an 
invasion by the Sac Indians, led by a chief whose 
name was familiar to every Illinois settler. Black 
Hawk. The Sacs had once owned the northern por- 
tion of Illinois, but in 1804 had sold it to the United 
States, and moved west of the Mississippi, with 
the understanding that they could hunt and plant 
corn in Illinois until it was settled. The whites had 
not kept faith with the Indians, squatters in large 
numbers taking possession of land still unsurveyed. 
The Indians had resisted and there had been much 
bitterness and violence from both White and Red. 
Finally, in the spring of 1832, Black Hawk decided 
to invade the State. He had been persuaded by 
agitators that if he would attack, other Indian tribes 
would join him and that the British would send him 
powder and rifles; there was no chance of either of 
these things happening. 

As soon as Black Hawk and his braves appeared 
along the Rock River, the governor called for vol- 
unteers from the State to help the soldiers of the 
regular army stationed at Fort Armstrong (Rock 
Island in the Mississippi) to drive him back. There 



58 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

were few slackers among the younger men when 
this call came to New Salem, one of the first to enlist 
being Lincoln. Each company chose its own cap- 
tain, and to Lincoln's surprise and delight, he was 
elected. He often said, in talking about his life, 
that nothing that had ever happened to him pleased 
him more than this honor. 

Undoubtedly it was because of the liking that the 
men had for him that they chose him, for probably 
no man in New Salem knew less about military mat- 
ters than he did. He did not know how to give 
orders. Nor did he know the regulations necessary 
for the discipline of a camp. During the march, 
on which they immediately started, he constantly 
got into trouble through his Ignorance. In later life 
he used frequently to tell with great enjoyment of 
his own awkwardness and mistakes. Once when the 
company was marching twenty abreast, they came 
up against a fence in which there was a gate. Lin- 
coln, at his wits' end as to the proper order, called 
out: "This company is dismissed for two minutes, 
when it will fall in again on the other side of the 
gate." 

Because of his good-humored tolerance with his 
company and their propensity for mischief and 
carousing, he had to suffer much military humiliation 
and once, not at all for his own fault, but for shield- 
ing his men, he wore a wooden sword for two days. 

Black Hawk was followed north for a month 
without an encounter. By this time the volunteers 
were pretty well tired of the long marches, poor 



Starting Out for Himself 59 

food, and poor shelter. Most of them refused to go 
on and finally the governor mustered them all out 
and arranged for a new levy. This broke up Lin- 
coln's company. He did not go home, however, but 
reenlisted as a private in a company of mounted 
independent rangers, whose duty it was to carry mes- 
sages and spy on the enemy. After a month of this 
work these rangers were mustered out and Lincoln 
enlisted a third time in an independent company and 
here he remained until the end of the war in July. 

He saw no fighting through the three months — 
saw no hostile Indians except a few dead ones that 
he helped bury. But if there were no battles, there 
was much real hardship, for the food was scanty and 
poor, the marches long and difficult, often through 
forests and swamps, and the ground offered the only 
beds. The return to New Salem, after he was finally 
mustered out at Whitewater in Wisconsin, was espe- 
cially hard, for his horse had been stolen and he was 
obliged to "foot it" save when a friendly comrade 
gave him a lift or when he could get a canoe and 
paddle down a stream flowing in the direction that 
he was going. 

If his service in the Black Hawk War brought 
Lincoln no glory as a soldier it was the finest oppor- 
tunity he had yet had for making the acquaintance 
of numbers of men and of studying the needs and 
the conditions of Illinois. He met, in the three 
months of campaigning and marching, scores of 
men with whom he was later to work in the law 
and in politics. His experience taught him, too, how 



6o Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

right he had been In thinking that the greatest need 
of Illinois at that time was better transportation. 
He still believed the way to get this was by improving 
the rivers and he came back to New Salem more 
confident than ever that the navigation of the Sanga- 
mon River was the issue on which to make his cam- 
paign, for the war had by no means killed his polit- 
ical ambition. As a matter of fact, he knew that 
he was stronger than ever with the men of his county, 
and when he reached New Salem he picked up his 
campaigning where he had dropped it, using the very 
handbills which he had had ready when the call to 
volunteer came. 

His campaigning had none of the formality of 
that of to-day. Candidates traveled from settle- 
ment to settlement, on foot or a-horseback, often in 
groups, picking up an audience wherever they could 
find men and spending much time by the wayside, 
at the stores, or in taverns discussing the questions 
of the day. Every man felt that politics was part 
of his business and that he must understand it if he 
was to vote right; consequently he took every op- 
portunity to hear and to question. Speakers ex- 
pected to be interrupted by their hearers and a great 
deal of their success depended upon the good humor, 
the frankness, and the information they put into 
their answers. If a speaker resented a question, it 
was generally concluded he was caught or consid- 
ered himself superior to his hearers. Lincoln liked 
his audiences too well to treat their interruptions 
contemptuously; besides he was so interested in what 
he was talking about and was always so anxious to 



Starting Out for Himself 



6i 




3" Oaly thogeneraldirectioaof ^^^ 

the marcbcs of his company HV. 



! Indicated ht're. In jrolnc 
from Ottawa to Galena and back 
Captain Ilea may have vnry well 
marched his conipany tliro"Kh 
Dlion'3 Ferry. In returning froi 
Whitewater to New Ssli-m, Limola 
may have followed the nver to DLxon 
here were urdouhte.dly eevenUaldi 



KellOTO'a 






Starting Out for Himself 63 

get new light that he regarded questions as a help 
rather than a hindrance. 

He frequently found other duties at public meet- 
ings than speaking and answering questions. He 
had to keep the crowd in order. A regular feature 
of most of the political gatherings seems to have 
been a fight on the outskirts. Lincoln did not hesi- 
tate to come down from his platform when inter- 
rupted by a scrap and in his own way restore order. 
Noticing that one of his friends was getting the 
worst of it in a general fight which broke out at 
one of his meetings, he jumped from the platform, 
pushed his way through the crowd, and, seizing the 
bully who had started the row by the seat of his 
trousers, "threw him" — so those who saw it always 
insisted — "twelve feet away." Returning to the 
stand he went on with his speech. 

There was no doubt but that the people liked 
his speeches. He spent most of his time arguing 
that the Sangamon should be opened and he showed 
them how it could be done. They saw that he had 
studied the river, knew how it acted at different 
seasons, where its length could be shortened, its 
channel cleared. Here was a young man who kept 
his eyes open, they said, and who studied not only 
what was in printed books but in the greatest of 
books, the life and country around him. Then they 
liked the modesty of his speeches. "Upon the sub- 
jects I have treated," he told them, "I have spoken 
as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any 
or all of them, but as soon as I discover my opin- 
ions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce 



64 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

them." "Knows he can learn," they told one an- 
other, "and means to do It. Isn't afraid to change 
if he finds he's wrong. He'll make his mark yet." 

How strong he made himself in Sangamon 
County was shown when the elections came, for, al- 
though there were eight candidates in the field, he 
stood third on the list. In New Salem he received 
227 of the 300 votes cast. Who would dream, to 
have seen him starting out from his father's log 
cabin in Macon County in the spring of 1831, in 
his jean trousers, his ax over his shoulder, that in 
two years he would receive over two thirds of the 
vote cast in the town in which he settled, for a posi- 
tion so important as that of member of the Illinois 
Assembly. 

The election, even if called a defeat, was a vic- 
tory. He had made himself a place among men 
in his community. He knew it well. That was 
the thing he had been working for. He was far 
from discouraged. Two years from now there 
would be another election and he meant to win that 
time. 

But now he must have work. Storekeeping, he 
had learned when he was clerking, just about sat- 
isfied him, and as there was a grocery for sale in 
New Salem, he and an acquaintance, William Berry 
— a fellow not too fond of work, it must be ac- 
knowledged — decided to buy the store, giving their 
notes in exchange. And so, late in 1832, we find 
the firm of Lincoln & Berry in business in New 
Salem. 

Hardly had they opened their door before two 



Starting Out for Himself 65 

other groceries in New Salem were forced to sell. 
Lincoln and Berry, in spite of the fact that they had 
no money, bought the stocks. It was high finance I 
Two penniless youths buying up three stores and 
doing it entirely on credit. Not a cent of money had 
passed hands in the consolidation. 

What pleased Lincoln about the undertaking was 
that he now had ample time to read. Customers 
usually found him lying on the counter, his feet 
propped up against a pile of groceries or calico, 
reading anything he could get his hands on. 

But even if he was an unbusinesslike storekeeper, 
there probably never was a more popular one. His 
store, as that of his friend Jones in Gentyrville, be- 
came the meeting place of the men from the town 
and the county in their leisure hours, a place to dis- 
cuss politics, neighborhood affairs, listen to stories. 
Liking for him grew steadily and as people knew 
him better they began to comment more and more 
on his scrupulous honesty. A woman told how one 
evening he weighed her out a half pound of tea, and 
the next morning when he came in discovered on his 
scales a four-ounce weight. He realized at once 
that in the darkness he had made a mistake and 
without waiting hurried off and delivered the balance 
of the half pound. Another customer told how he 
walked three miles once, after the store was closed, 
to return an overcharge of six and a quarter cents. 

And as for his kindness, it was not long before 
in New Salem, as back in Gentryville, he had made 
a reputation for helping everybody that *was in 
trouble. You could always count on him. He 



66 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

boarded In the little country tavern, but more than 
once when there were too many travelers for the 
beds, Lincoln cheerfully gave up his and slept on 
the counter In his store. More than one traveler 
who had broken down or stuck In the mud In the one 
poor street of New Salem had a tale to tell of a 
storekeeper of wonderful strength who lifted the 
wagon out or mended the broken parts. 

It was through his willingness to do a good turn 
to a traveler that this year of storekeeping brought 
him the most valuable books he had ever owned, 
books he was fully able to appreciate and use. One^ 
day a man drove up, who was moving his family 
and household goods westward and had overloaded. 
He asked Lincoln If he would not buy a barrel of 
plunder for which he had no room. Lincoln good- 
naturedly consented, and, paying for the barrel, put 
It away without knowing what was In It. Some time 
afterward he dumped the contents on the floor and 
was amazed to find In the collection a complete set 
of Blackstone's Commentaries. No possession 
could have been more precious to him at the mo- 
ment; and he set himself to the reading of these vol- 
umes, which he always considered the basis of legal 
learning, with a determination to master them. Men 
seeing him stretched under the tree In front of Lin- 
coln & Berry's store, or lying on his counter, would 
ask what he was reading. "Reading?" he would 
say, "I am studying — studying law." And more 
than one who received this answer went away, shak- 
ing his head over Lincoln's way of keeping store. 

It was not long before the community, seeing his 



Starting Out for Himself 67 

interest in the law, began to ask services of him. 
The justices of the peace would call on him to dis- 
cuss a point or to examine the papers they had made 
out. Lincoln was quick to see that here was a chance 
for him, so he began to study how to make out wills, 
contracts, deeds — all of the various legal instru- 
ments by which men carry on their business. It was 
not long before he was doing this work for many 
of his friends, sometimes with fees, oftener with- 
out. 

If Lincoln's partner, William Berry, had been 
industrious and honest, he might have made up for 
what Lincoln lacked as a storekeeper; but he was 
neither. He was a shiftless fellow, drinking more 
than was good for him, and in six months' time 
the firm was forced to sell. They sold to men who 
were no more sensible than they in business, and 
who not only failed but, worse still, fled without 
making any arrangement for paying the notes which 
they had taken over. Soon after this Berry died, 
and Lincoln found himself responsible for the debts 
of the three stores consolidated the year before, as 
well as the debts of the gentlemen who had taken 
over the venture — responsible and not a cent to his 
name. There was a way out of it. He might have 
pleaded bankruptcy, but he could not square such 
a course with the laws that he had laid down for 
himself. He went to the various creditors, promis- 
ing them that he would pay everything if they would 
give him time. 

And he did — every cent of it, although he was 
nearly twenty years in doing it and found it so heavy 



68 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

a burden that he used to speak of his obligation 
as the National Debt. 

But what was he to do now? A big debt on his 
hands, a great ambition in his heart, no friends to 
help him with money or influence — only himself to 
rely on. It was not a bright outlook, you may 
think, but as a fact Lincoln had made in this part of 
Illinois a reputation for honesty, hard work, in- 
telligence and kindness which was worth more than 
a fortune in money would have been. He had 
proved himself the kind of young man that work 
seeks, and even before the store was closed, an open- 
ing had come. 

A very important task in a new and growing 
country is the surveying. Farms and roads are 
being laid out, towns are being started, the work 
of fixing boundaries goes on incessantly, and it re- 
quires not only knowledge and skill but indifference 
to hardship, particularly the latter, in a country like 
Sangamon County. The surveyor for that part of 
the world — a well-educated gentleman, John Cal- 
houn, needed a helper. He had noticed Lincoln, 
and just before the store failed sent him word that 
if he would qualify — that is, if he could show that 
he knew enough of the science of surveying — he 
would take him on his staff. 

Two points troubled Lincoln in this offer. He 
and Calhoun belonged to opposite political parties 
and he feared that if he accepted office he might 
be expected to change his views — that he could not 
do. Then, he knew nothing of the science of sur- 
veying. He went to see Calhoun and frankly stated 



Starting! Out for Himself 



69 



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Starting Out for Himself 71 

his doubts. He was told that his position had no 
political string tied to it and that if he would learn 
surveying they would wait for him. 

Now surveying is not an easy science, but to Lin- 
coln this was no objection. It was something new 
to learn, it meant honest, useful, and well-paid work 
that gave him a chance to serve people and at the 
same time to get acquainted with them. 

He borrowed the necessary books and hurrying 
back to New Salem, went at them. Night and day 
he studied, going to Mentor Graham for help when 
puzzled. His friends saw him grow thin and white 
under the effort he made. It was tremendous, for 
in six weeks he reported to Calhoun that he had 
mastered the books and was ready for duty. 

He now had a business — a business he liked and 
one for which he soon proved he was thoroughly 
competent. He was a careful, accurate, conscien- 
tious surveyor. The boundaries he drew were 
never disputed; but, what is more remarkable, he 
seems to have always remembered the lines he had 
drawn and the marks that he had made. His son 
Robert says that in 1858, when he was a boy of 
about fifteen, he drove his father once through a 
region in which he had done much surveying, and 
that several times, Mr. Lincoln stopped the horse 
and laughingly asked him to go a little distance into 
the woods and see if he could not find, at a par- 
ticular spot which he described, a blazed tree. He 
had marked that tree, he said, as a survey corner. 
Robert Lincoln says that he did this several times 
and not once did he make a mistake. 



7^ Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

But surveying was only a way of earning an hon- 
est living. He had no idea of making it a perma- 
nent profession, nor did he let it interfere with his 
ambition to become a member of the next Assem- 
bly for which the election came in the fall of 1834. 
As he worked he campaigned, and successfully, for 
when the time came, Lincoln was elected. 

Something more important than his election hap- 
pened to him in this campaign, however. This was 
making up his mind to adopt the law as a profes- 
sion. Deeply interested as he had always been in 
legal reading, he had never dared before this to 
hope that there was a chance for him to learn enough 
to be admitted to the bar, but while he was elec- 
tioneering one of his fellow candidates, John T. 
Stuart, a lawyer of Springfield with whom he had 
become acquainted in the Black Hawk War, began 
to urge him to try for the bar. "I'll lend you 
books," he told Lincoln. "Study nights and as you 
travel from place to place just as you have always 
done. You have already a foundation. You can 
do it." 

There was nothing Lincoln wanted so much to be- 
lieve as that he could do it. At least he could try. 
Springfield was twenty miles from New Salem, but 
he walked or rode back and forth, to get the books 
he wanted, and as he traveled he studied them — 
often aloud. 

You can see him, can you not? A long, lean 
figure, with a great shock of black hair, surveying 
instrument under his arm, an open book in his hand, 
striding or riding across the rough prairie, pre- 



Starting Out for Himself 73 

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FAOaailUl 0» A EEPORT OF A BOAD SDRVET BT LINCOLN. 



Starting Out for Himself 75 

paring for the life he wanted. He was not yet twen- 
ty-six years old, but see what he had done. He 
had found by sheer hard work an interesting, use- 
ful way of earning his living; he had deter- 
mined that the way was open, with more hard work, 
to the profession he loved and honored above 
all others — the law; and he was a member of the 
Assembly of Illinois. But could he go on? Could 
a young man, handicapped by poverty and lack of 
social and educational opportunities as he had been, 
succeed when he left the pioneer country and tried 
his fortune among people of training and wealth? 
The next great test for Lincoln was to prove that 
he was as good or better a man than those who had 
had every chance put in their way while he had had 
to make chances for himself out of what seemed to 
many nothing but handicaps. 



CHAPTER IV 

A GREAT DECISION 

I didn't begin with askings. I took my job and I stuck 
And I took the chances they wouldn't, an' now they're 
calling it luck, 

RuDYARD Kipling. 

TWO years after he had made his great deci- 
sion to become a lawyer, Lincoln felt himself 
ready to apply for admission to the bar. He 
seems to have been able to satisfy those in author- 
ity that he was fit, for in September of 1836 he 
was licensed. He did not begin to practice at once, 
for just before this license was issued, he had been 
reelected to a second term in the State legislature. 
This kept him busy for the winter, but as soon as he 
came back to New Salem, early In the spring of 
1837, he packed up his few belongings — they could 
all be put Into a saddlebag — and said good-by to 
the town. 

It could not have been an easy parting, for New 
Salem had been his home for nearly six years. There 
was probably not a man, woman, or child in the 
town or the county around that he did not know, 
and with almost every one of them he had friendly 
relations. Twice they had sent him to the legisla- 
ture, and they would have liked to have had him 
stay by the town, for nearly all of his friends pre- 
76 



A Great Decision 77 

dieted that he had the makings of a great man in 
him. 

Not only was the parting hard, but the future 
looked anything but bright. He was giving up the 
profession by which he had been earning his living. 
He had what seemed to him a huge debt on his 
hands — that left over from his venture in the gro- 
cery business — and he was entering a profession 
which already had many followers in Springfield, 
the town which he had chosen as his future home. 
Could he succeed? How could he live? Would 
there be anybody that would be willing to admit him 
into his office? 

It was rather a melancholy young man that rode 
into Springfield in March of 1837 and looked about 
for a place to live. Fortunately, he came on a 
friend at the start — a prosperous young storekeeper, 
James Speed by name, who advised Lincoln to rent 
a room and furnish it himself. 

"But I haven't the money to buy the furniture," 
Lincoln told him. 

"If that is so, come and live with me," Speed 
said, "I have a big room, plenty of space for two 
of us, over the store." 

Lincoln brightened up at once, and, running up- 
stairs, threw his saddlebags on the floor and came 
back, exclaiming joyfully, "Well, Speed, I'm 
moved." 

He had as good success in finding a law partner 
as he had a home. Major John T. Stuart, with 
whom he had become acquainted in the Black Hawk 
War and by whose advice he had decided to take 



78 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

up the law as a profession, was just severing his 
connection with his partner. He believed in Lin- 
coln and invited him to join him. 

It was a fine chance for a young lawyer — this as- 
sociation with a man so well established and so gen- 
erally respected as Major Stuart, and at once the 
training that Lincoln had given himself began to 
come out in his work. Whatever the case, big or 
little, his first effort was to find out the root of the 
thing, what it really hinged on. He knew that it 
is not the leaves on the tree or the branches that 
count, it is the root, and it was this in his law prob- 
lems that he looked for. He would give away 
point after point if he did not feel they were es- 
sential. 

"Strip off the technicalities," he used to say, "get 
at the heart of the thing, and then you can win." 
He never had any patience with people that fussed 
over things that did not matter. Once, when he 
was President, a commission he had sent out to 
make an investigation came back with a huge re- 
port, loaded down with details. Lincoln was thor- 
oughly disgusted. "If I send out a man to look up 
a horse for me, I want him to come back with his 
points ; not how many hairs he has on his tail." And 
so in the law, it was always points he was after. 

Having the points, he took ample time to explain 
to a jury just what they were, always in the sim- 
plest kind of language, without Latin phrases or 
technical terms of any kind, such as many lawyers 
used. He generally knew the jurors, or at least 
knew about them, just what their experiences had 



A Great Decision 79 

been, the kind of thing they would understand; and 
he talked to them as if they were sitting around the 
stove, arguing. He was very particular, too, that 
the counsel opposing him should not befuddle the 
minds of the jury with misrepresentations. When 
a lawyer tried this with Lincoln, he was sure to meet 
his match. He would spring to his feet and pro- 
test so effectively that almost invariably the lawyer 
would be overruled. Sometimes his anger over a 
misstatement was so great that those who listened 
said he roared like a lion. 

This habit of Lincoln's of protesting when he be- 
lieved the jury was being deceived frequently caused 
funny scenes in the Illinois courts. One stormy day, 
he had come into court with his feet soaked, and 
after presenting his case, sat down by the courtroom 
stove to dry out. He had pulled off his boots and was 
holding up his big feet, all the time listening intently 
to the opposing lawyer. Suddenly, the lawyer said 
something that Lincoln knew not to be true. He 
didn't stop to put on his boots, but with one in each 
hand sprang into the middle of the room, complain- 
ing loudly to the judge that the counsel was wil- 
fully deceiving the jury. 

So honest was he in his law work that he would 
never, if he could help it, take a case in which he 
did not thoroughly believe. He wanted nothing 
but clean cases, he said. This came largely from 
his reverence for the law — it was intended to do 
justice. Those who were wrong should not win a 
case, in his judgment, and he was unwilling to help 
them do so. He had the greatest contempt for 



8o Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

the fellow that would look over the register of 
deeds to hunt up defects in titles or who was on 
the watch for quarrels out of which he might get a 
case. He was unwilling to stir up lawsuits. "There 
could not be a worse man," he used to say, "than 
one who would do this." His idea was that a law- 
yer's business was to point out to people who were 
disputing how they could settle their differences. 
His theory was set down in one of his fine phrases, 
"As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior oppor- 
tunity of being a good man." 

He carried out this theory. A man came to him 
once to ask his help in a claim he was making for 
six hundred dollars. Lincoln at once saw that the 
case was tricky. "You have no claim," he thun- 
dered. "I won't take your case, and my advice to 
you is that you go to work and earn six hundred 
dollars." 

When he found young men or boys trying to prac- 
tice sharp tricks on others and appealing to the 
law to help them he always took it seriously and 
did his best to point out to them what a dangerous 
thing it was to begin life in this way. 

An old farmer once employed him to recover a 
note from two young men who had bought a team 
from him and refused to pay on the ground that 
they were minors. Lincoln took the case, and ad- 
dressing the jury he told them that this was one of 
the most important cases they had ever had to de- 
cide, that it was not a matter of the payment of 
the money simply, but it was a matter of the future 
of the two boys. They were just starting out in 



A Great Decision 8 1 

life. They had tried a dishonest trick. If the jury- 
should give a verdict for them it would leave a stain 
of dishonor upon them which they could never live 
down. They would always be known as tricksters. 
After a long and serious talk of this kind, he turned 
to the young men. 

"Boys," he said, "pay the note. You owe it. 
Don't begin life in this dishonest way." 

The elder of the two boys was so moved by Mr. 
Lincoln's appeal that he promptly promised to pay 
the farmer, and the judge dismissed the case. Lin- 
coln as a lawyer often did work for boys not unlike 
that of a wise judge of a juvenile court. 

The training that he had given himself in public 
speaking from the time that he went to school in 
Indiana came in good stead now. It had made it 
natural and easy for him to speak what was in his 
mind. Not only did he do this with great clear- 
ness, emphasizing only the points that seemed to him 
to matter, but with a candor which won every lis- 
tener. His wonderful skill in illustrating a point 
by a story helped him greatly with a jury. Often 
he could make them see things by a story or an 
illustration drawn from things with which they were 
familiar more quickly and effectively than by any 
amount of hard legal argument. And you could 
depend on him to put all the fun possible into his 
pleading. He told his stories with so much zest, 
often acting them out as he went along, that every- 
body in the courtroom was all attention when he 
began to plead. 

Take this case as an illustration. A quarrelsome, 



82 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

profane chap in the community had attacked a man, 
but he had chosen the wrong victim this time, for 
he was soundly thrashed. Instead of taking quietly 
what he had brought upon himself, like the bully 
that he was, he brought a charge of assault and bat- 
tery against the man whom he had attacked. Mr. 
Lincoln took the case of the defendant. He told 
the jury that his client was in the fix of a man who, 
walking down the road with a pitchfork on his 
shoulder, was attacked by a fierce dog. In fighting 
the animal off he stuck the prongs of his fork into 
the brute and killed him. 

"What made you kill my dog?" said the farmer. 

"What made him try to bite me?" 

"Well, why didn't you get after him with the 
other end of the pitchfork?" 

"Why didn't he come after me with his other 
end?" 

Mr. Lincoln, as he made this answer, whirled 
about, in his long arms an imaginary dog, and 
pushed its tail toward the jurors. The acting was 
so good and so comical that the case was won with- 
out further pleading. 

The court enjoyed Lincoln's fun, but at the same 
time they had a wholesome respect for his indig- 
nation. When he tried a case against an out-and- 
out rascal, he was often biting in his satires. You 
remember how, when he was still a boy in Gentry- 
ville, he used satirical verse to ridicule an enemy. 
When he came to the law, he often employed his 
power of satire against an opponent. "Lincoln's 
skinning him," the people used to say, and he him- 



A Great Decision 83 

self would sometimes remark, "Just you watch me 
skin him," when he was prosecuting a sneak, a liar, 
or a thief. 

All these qualities would not have amounted to 
so much in the law if he had not been so thorough 
and so continuous a student. Much as he had read, 
he was always conscious of how much he did not 
know — one of the most important things for a man 
who wants to do real things in the world to realize. 
He was never willing to let even a small case go 
without giving it honest study. Lawyers who trav- 
eled with him on the circuit always told, as long as 
they lived, of how, night after night, when they 
were sleeping, Lincoln would lie in bed with a lamp 
on a chair beside him, studying law books. Always 
to know more was what he was after. 

Whenever he had a chance, he studied lawyers of 
large reputation and compared his own knowledge 
v/ith theirs, trying to learn from them. In 1855, 
twenty years after he took his first decision to read 
law, he was called to Cincinnati in a case which was 
famous in those days, that of the McCormick 
Reaper. 

The case hinged on the ownership of certain pat- 
ents, and required much knowledge of harvesting 
machinery. The company which was being sued by 
McCormick for infringing his patents had employed 
the best patent lawyers in the country, among them, 
Edwin M. Stanton, who, only a few years later, was 
to be Secretary of War under Lincoln. 

A younger member of the company who knew 
Lincoln well and admired him greatly, suggested 



84 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

that he be included in the counsel. Mr. Lincoln was 
greatly pleased, for it would associate him with 
famous lawyers of the East. He studied the testi- 
mony diligently and went to Cincinnati where the 
trial was held, hoping, no doubt, to make an im- 
pression. But when he arrived there, he felt that 
Stanton and his associates, men of the East, who 
regarded themselves as vastly superior to the coun- 
try lawyer of Illinois, treated him with something 
like contempt. They did not seek his counsel, and 
they did not ask him to present his argument. Mr. 
Lincoln was much hurt by their unwillingness to 
take him in, and at first wanted to go home, but his 
friend persuaded him to stay and hear the trial out. 
No sooner was the argument fairly launched than 
he became intensely interested. He saw at once 
that these men whom he believed to have been un- 
fair and unkind to him were at the same time great 
lawyers, men with a large command of legal learn- 
ing. He listened with the closest attention to every 
point made; never, he claimed afterward, had he 
heard pleading which impressed him more. 

After the trial was over he said to his friend, "I 
am going home. I am going home to study law." 

"Why, Mr. Lincoln," his friend said, "you stand 
at the head of the bar in Illinois now. What are 
you talking about?" 

"Oh, I know, I can get along with the way things 
are done there now," he said; "but these college- 
trained men, who have devoted their whole lives 
to study, are coming out West one of these days. 
They study their cases as we never do. They have 



A Great Decision 85 

got as far as Cincinnati now. They will soon be 
in Illinois. I am going home to study law, and 
when they get to Illinois, I'll be ready for them." 

Hard work always counts. More and more im- 
portant cases came Lincoln's way, many of them 
connected with the development of the new coun- 
try. An interesting one came to him in 1857. You 
remember how all through his young manhood he 
had been associated with rivers — the Ohio, the San- 
gamon, the Mississippi — and how interested he had 
been in the transportation and travel which went on 
by the rivers? But in the 40's and 50's railroads 
began to multiply in Illinois. Soon they wanted 
to cross the Mississippi and reach the great plains 
beyond. It was natural enough that the river boats 
which up to this time had had a monopoly of the 
carrying trade should object to the rivers being 
bridged. Not only did they object but the cities 
of the South objected. They thought it would di- 
vert business from them. But a bridge was put over 
the Mississippi finally at Rock Island. It proved 
a great thing for Chicago, then little more than a 
village ; the town began to build up rapidly because 
of this direct connection with the country beyond. 

In 1856 a steamer, the Effie Afton, struck one of 
the piers of the Rock Island Bridge and was wrecked 
and burned, a part of the bridge being at the same 
time destroyed. The owners of the steamboat af 
once brought suit against the railroad. The river 
must not be bridged again. St. Louis, then the 
largest city along the river, jealous of the growth 
of Chicago, joined the boat owners in the fight. 



86 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

The entire Middle West was excited over the issue. 
Lincoln was engaged to defend the bridge. 

It was a case which gave him full opportunity for 
the problems that he liked best. The character of 
the Mississippi, its currents, velocity, driftwood, 
depth of water, the customs of navigators and pilots 
— many points involving nice problems both of river 
navigation and of engineering were involved. 

He went at the task "like a dog at a root," as he 
used to express it, and mastered an enormous num- 
ber of facts and figures so thoroughly that as the 
trial went on, he was able, again and again, to cor- 
rect his opponents, without consulting his notes. He 
won the case practically on two points — one based 
on common sense, that one man has just as good a 
right to go across a river as another has to go up 
or down it; the second based on an imaginative sense 
of what was good for the country. He drew a 
wonderful and moving picture of the possibilities of 
the great West beyond the Mississippi and the duty 
of men to combine to open it up to the world. 

This case showed Lincoln at his very best, and 
it proved, too, how thoroughly he was following 
his decision, the decision he had taken two years 
before at Cincinnati — to go back to Illinois and 
study law. 

Hard as he worked and extensive as was the prac- 
tice he built up, Lincoln never made much money. 
His first object in practicing law was not money; 
it was to see that justice is done among men. His 
fees were always small, and they were fitted to the 
pocketbook of his client. Again and again he would 



A Great Decision 87 

take a case for a poor or weak client where he would 
receive little or nothing when he might have ob- 
tained a good-sized fee on the other side. 

A widow whose cow had been killed by a rail- 
road train once came to him for help. The rail- 
road, knowing Lincoln's power, was anxious about 
the case. It did not want the widow to win lest 
a precedent be established and it be obliged to pay 
damages whenever its trains killed an animal. It 
accordingly sent an agent to Mr. Lincoln, offering 
him a retainer of five hundred dollars — a very large 
sum at that time, if he would take the case. 

"But I have already promised the widow I will 
take her case." 

"But the widow cannot pay you anything," the 
agent argued, "and here is five hundred dollars as 
a retainer." 

"No," thundered Lincoln, "I won't go back on 
her. I will take her case and moreover I will win 
it." And win it he did. 

Although Lincoln made so little money as a law- 
yer, there never was a man more generous with what 
he had. Money seems to have meant nothing to 
him save to fulfill his obligations and to help others. 
His father's family was one of the first to profit 
all their lives by his generosity. Thomas Lincoln 
kept his little home in Coles County, Illinois, until 
his death, and his stepmother held it afterward and 
had her support through Abraham Lincoln's kind- 
ness. He could be very stern, however, with those 
of his relatives whom he knew were shiftless. No 
more sensible letters were ever written to a lazy 



88 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

and discontented man than those Lincoln wrote to 
his stepbrother, John D. Johnston, a ne'er-do-well 
whom he had often assisted. Here is one of them: 

"Dear Johnston: Your request for eighty dollars I do not 
think it best to comply with now. At the various times when 
I have helped you a little you have said to me, 'We can get 
along very well now;' but in a very short time I find you in 
the same difficulty again. Now, this can only happen by some 
defect in your conduct. What that defect is, I think I know. 
You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether, 
since I saw you, you have done a good whole day's work in any 
one day. You do not very much dislike to work, and still j^ou 
do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that 
you could get much for it. This habit of uselessly wasting 
time is the whole difficulty; it is vastly important to you, and 
still more so to your children, that you should break the habit. 
It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, 
and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it, easier 
than they can get out after they are in. 

"You are now in need of some money; and what I propose 
is, that you shall go to work, 'tooth and nail,' for somebody 
who will give you money for it. Let father and your boys take 
charge of your things at home, prepare for a crop, and make 
the crop, and you go to work for the best money wages, or 
in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get; and, to 
secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you, 
that for every dollar you will, between this and the first of 
May, get for your own labor, either in money or as your own 
indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar. By this, if 
you hire yourself at ten dollars a month, from me you will 
get ten more, making twenty dollars a month for your work. 
In this I do not mean you shall go off to St. Louis, or the lead 
mines, or the gold mines in California, but I mean for you to 
go at it for the best wages you can get close to home in Coles 
County. Now, if you will do this, you will be soon out of 
debt, and, what is better, you will have a habit that will keep 
you from getting in debt again. But, if I should now clear 
you out of debt, next year you would be just as deep in as ever. 
You say you would almost give your place in heaven for 
seventy or eighty dollars. Then you value your place in heaven 
very cheap, for I am sure you can, with the offer I make, get 



A Great Decision 89 

the seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months' work. 
You say if I will furnish you the money you will deed me the 
land, and if you don't pay the money back, you will deliver 
possession. Nonsense! If you can't now live with the land, 
how will you then live without it? You have always been kind 
to me, and I do not mean to be unkind to you. On the con- 
trary, if you will but follow my advice, you will find it worth 
more than eighty times eighty dollars to you. 
"Affectionately your brother, 

"A. Lincoln." 

So modest was Lincoln about his fees that his 
fellow lawyers were often provoked at him, because 
he would not keep up prices. They even on one oc- 
casion arrested him and held a mock trial at which 
he was accused of impoverishing the bar. He was 
found guilty but let off on condition that he would 
correct what they claimed to be his evil ways. 

These mock trials of the Illinois lawyers were 
one of the ways that they amused themselves on the 
circuit. In those days in that part of the world, 
lawyers traveled from county seat to county seat 
over a big circuit. Lincoln lived in Springfield, but 
he practiced throughout the Eighth Judicial Dis- 
trict. There were five counties in this district, and 
every fall and every spring the court traveled from 
place to place, taking care of the law business. 
There were no railroads, and they went on horse- 
back or in buggies or wagons, generally in groups. 
These trips were full of fun and excitement. The 
country was wild and many of the lawyers carried 
guns, looking for deer and smaller animals. Not 
unfrequently the court was delayed a day or more 
because a part of the company, the judge included, 
was tracking a deer. Practical jokes were common 



9o Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

on these journeys. Lincoln played one once of 
which lawyers in Illinois still tell. 

It was in the spring of the year, and a river which 
the party supposed they must cross in order to get 
to the town where they were due had overflowed the 
prairies; it looked as if the whole country was under 
water. None of the lawyers except Lincoln were 
familiar with the place, and they were feeling pretty 
serious. 

"I know this country," Lincoln told them, "and if 
you will trust yourselves to me, I will take you to 
town safely." Of course they consented. 

"You must strip," he said, "it is pretty wet around 
here," so judge and lawyers pulled off coats, trou- 
sers, shirts, and boots down to the skin, rolled them 
all in tight bundles, and, under Lincoln's directions, 
strapped them to their saddles. 

"Fall in line," was Lincoln's order; and at the 
head of this queer-looking procession he started on 
a long, roundabout journey. For two or three hours 
the men traveled, the water never much above their 
horses' hoofs, when suddenly Lincoln announced, 
"Here's our town." Then it dawned on them that 
their idea that they must cross the main channel of 
the river in order to get to the place was a mistake; 
that they had been on the right side all the time. 
All that they had been doing in their nakedness was 
to skirt the edge of a shallow overflow. 

If the stories of these years that Lincoln traveled 
the Eighth Circuit are full of practical jokes, they 
are still fuller of tales of his kindness, not to men 



A Great Decision 91 

alone but even to birds of the air. His companions 
when they went back to their families nearly al- 
ways had some story to tell their children of the 
good turns he did. 

One day as they were going along, he heard birds 
crying. He at once dismounted, looked them up, 
found they had fallen from their nest, and carefully 
put them back. Again they passed a young pig 
which had been caught in a rail fence, so tight that 
it could not get out. It was squealing for dear life 
and in danger of killing itself. Lincoln stopped and 
with great care removed the fence and let the little 
fellow loose. Then he put the bars back and went 
on. 

In the towns everybody knew him and loved him. 
There were boys and girls in many of those towns 
who would run home at night, crying joyfully, "Mr. 
Lincoln has come ! Mr. Lincoln has come !" When 
he visited in their homes they gathered about him 
and listened to his stories. Many a boy, when he 
knew Mr. Lincoln was going to try a case, would 
slip in to hear him argue. He would play ball with 
them on the street, pitch quoits, and wrestle with 
them. They were not afraid even to play practical 
jokes on him. 

He wore a tall, stovepipe hat, as was the custom, 
and one day in Bloomington, Illinois, some of his 
young admirers rigged a string across the street, at 
just the proper height to catch his hat and tip it off. 
Lincoln took after the young rascals, chasing them 
so hard and furiously that they were frightened. 



92 Boy Scouts* Life of Lincoln 

He finally collared them all, and when he saw they 
were looking scared, said, "Come on, boys, I will 
stand treat." 

Not only was he the friend of the children but of 
the young men just starting out in the law and need- 
ing advice and encouragement. He never was too 
busy to help a beginner out of a tight place or to 
give him a hint if he saw he was in danger of mak- 
ing a mistake. To many a young lawyer on the 
circuit he was like a father. Perhaps the best thing 
he gave them after his genuine sympathy in their 
difficulties was his constant advice to "work, work, 
work." 

Everywhere he went, up and down the country, 
he was loved; and never, in all those years when 
he was not only becoming daily a greater and greater 
lawyer but was becoming more and more prominent 
in public affairs, did he neglect an opportunity to 
do a good turn to an old friend. 

In 1857, when his mind was absorbed with several 
important lawsuits, with the arguments that he was 
working out against the extension of slavery in this 
country, and with fostering the new Republican 
party which was opposed to this extension, he 
learned one day that Duff Armstrong, the son of 
Jack Armstrong, the bully of the Clary's Grove 
Gang whom, you will remember, he had thrashed 
in New Salem back in 1832, had been arrested for 
murder. 

Now- the thrashing that Lincoln had given Jack 
Armstrong had done him good and had made him 
Lincoln's friend. It had made Hannah Armstrong, 



A Great Decision 93 

his wife, Lincoln's friend, too, and she had played 
almost the part of a mother to him — doing his 
mending, washing his clothes, and looking after 
him in many ways. When Lincoln heard of the 
sorrow that had come to Hannah Armstrong, he 
immediately wrote her the following letter: 

"Springfield, 111., 

"Sept., 1857. 
"Dear Mrs. Armstrong: I have just heard of your deep 
affliction, and the arrest of your son for murder. I can 
hardly believe that he can be capable of the crime alleged 
against him. It does not seem possible. I am anxious that 
he should be given a fair trial, at any rate; and gratitude for 
your long-continued kindness to me in adverse circumstances 
prompts me to offer my humble services gratuitously in his 
behalf. 

"It will afford me an opportunity to requite, in a small 
degree, the favors I received at your hand, and that of your 
lamented husband, when your roof afforded me a grateful 
shelter, without money and without price. 
"Yours truly, 

"A. Lincoln." 

One night in August, 1857, at a camp meeting 
near Havana, Duff, while drunk, quarreled with a 
friend and thrashed him. A few hours later, the 
same night, this boy was killed. The marks of two 
blows were found upon him — one of them proved to 
be from an ox yoke in the hands of a third mem- 
ber of the gang. Duff Armstrong was accused of 
dealing the second with a sling shot. He denied 
having used anything but his fist in the quarrel with 
the victim, a quarrel which he admitted. The first 
man was tried, found guilty, and sentenced. Duft 



94 ^oy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

lay in jail for several months, awaiting his trial. 
Mrs. Armstrong in the meantime was distracted 
with anxiety. Jack had died soon after Duff's ar- 
rest, and the last thing he had said to her was, "Sell 
everything you have and clear Duff." She was not 
at all sure it could be done. 

Mr. Lincoln's letter must have come to her like 
a gift from God. The lawyers whom she had en- 
gaged were glad enough to have his assistance. It 
was a number of months before the trial came off. 
Mr. Lincoln took charge of the case from the start. 

The witnesses, the jury, the spectators were nearly 
all people, or sons of people, that he had known 
in his early days in Illinois, and he talked to them 
in his friendly, intimate fashion, trying to get at 
the truth of what had happened. It finally came 
down to this, that the only damaging testimony 
against Duff was that of a boy who swore that he had 
seen Duff strike. "What time of night was that?" 
Mr. Lincoln asked. 

"Ten or eleven o'clock," he said. 

"How could you see him?" 

"Why," he said, "it was full moon, and I could 
see as clear as when the sun was in the sky." 

Mr. Lincoln came back again and again to this 
testimony. "You could see him by the light of the 
moon?" It was thoroughly impressed on the jury 
that this was where the case hung, and it seemed 
as if this evidence would convict poor Duff. 

When Mr. Lincoln rose to speak, he went back 
to the early days when he had known Duff's father 
and mother, and told of their kindness to him when 



A Great Decision 95 

he was alone and poor. He painted something of 
the life of the boy and his waywardness, and showed 
that the only serious testimony against him was this 
of the boy who swore that he saw him strike by the 
light of the moon. At this point, Mr. Lincoln 
pulled out of his pocket an almanac of 1857, and 
turning to the phase of the moon on the date of the 
murder, he pointed out that it was quite impossible 
that this testimony was true, because the moon that 
night was in its first quarter and had sunk before 
the hour of the murder. 

Judge and jury and lawyers pored over the al- 
manac in amazement. He had completely riddled 
the damaging testimony, and Duff was freed. 

This springing of a surprise at the end of a trial 
was characteristic of Mr. Lincoln. It was like the 
surprise in a play. In the Trailer case, as it is 
called, where Lincoln represented the two Trailer 
brothers who had been arrested on a confession of a 
third brother for the murder of a man, he created 
a sensation by producing in the open court the man 
said to have been murdered. 

It was in this way that in the years from 1837 ^^ 
i860, Lincoln built up his law practice. In those 
years he tried nearly one hundred and seventy-five 
cases before the Illinois Supreme Court, many of 
them of first importance. He became a great law- 
yer, not only because of his knowledge of the law 
and his skill in pleading, but because he looked on 
the law as the instrument for seeing that justice is 
done. He did it by his clearness of mind, his pas- 



g6 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

slon for the truth, his candor, his wit, his honest in- 
dignation against the thing that was mean and 
sneaking, and, above all, by his willingness to study 
and keep studying, always feeling that he did not 
know enough of his great subject. There can be 
no doubt that if he had continued in his profession 
the day would have come when he would have 
been able to meet on equal terms the great lawyers 
of the East as they came West, and that he himself 
would have been going East as their peer. 

But, great as was his interest in his profession, 
his reverence for it and his desire to serve men 
through it, the law had always had a rival in Lin- 
coln's mind; that rival was politics. In all these 
years in which he had been building himself up in 
the law to a point where he could meet the best of 
them, not only at home but abroad, he had never 
forgotten that he was a citizen before he was a law- 
yer. We left him in 1834 a member of the state 
legislature to follow his course as a lawyer, now 
we will go back and see what kind of a public servant 
he had made. 



CHAPTER V 

THE CALL OF HIS COUNTRY 

And though he promise to his loss 
He makes his promise good. 

Nahum Tate. 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was only a little boy 
when he first began to understand that he 
lived in a country in whose affairs every man 
is expected to take a part. Revolutionary soldiers 
who had fought under George Washington some- 
times sat at his father's fireside and told tales of 
Valley Forge and Yorktown. He learned from 
them that the United States was a young country and 
that it had cost men a terrible struggle to give it 
life. He discovered that after the war of which 
they talked there had followed a long, hard polit- 
ical fight to secure what they spoke of as the Union. 
And they told how, when the plan for running this 
Union was ready — they called it a Constitution — 
it had taken months to persuade the people to agree 
to it and to promise to carry on their affairs accord- 
ing to its directions. 

Later a life of Washington fell into his hands 
which helped him to understand still better what 
men had done in those early days. He never forgot 
the stories of the battlefields, of the sufferings of 
soldiers, of women, and of children of which that 
97 



98 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

book told. The thing that fixed itself particularly in 
his mind was that these men had struggled for 
something more than their own interest, something 
more even than independence; it was a dream that 
if they could work out their freedom in the way that 
they had planned, that it would be a "great promise 
to all the people of the world, to all time to come." 

Washington, the Constitution, the Declaration of 
Independence — these were the things over which he 
pondered; and as he did so there came a great de- 
sire in him to do his part toward making the new 
country a success. He wanted to be a man like 
Washington, like others of whom he read in the 
"Kentucky Preceptor" — men who had spent all their 
lives trying to free the oppressed and bring more 
happiness to the world. 

You have seen how, in all those years of his early 
manhood, difficult as things were for him, he worked 
hard and constantly to fit himself to be the kind of 
a man he thought a citizen in a free country should 
be. "Every man is said to have his peculiar ambi- 
tion," he told the people of Sangamon County, when 
he first asked their votes. "Whether it be true or 
not, I can say for one that I have no other so great 
as that of being esteemed by my fellow men by 
rendering myself worthy of their esteem." The 
more the people knew of him, the more they real- 
ized that he was what he sought to be — "worthy of 
their esteem" ; and it was because of this that they 
elected him to three successive terms in the As- 
sembly. 



The Call of His Country 99 

Lincoln began his career as a public servant de- 
termined to repay the people of Sangamon County 
for its confidence — they should never be sorry they 
chose him. He was not going to let them even be 
ashamed of his appearance. Up to this time in 
his life he had never worn anything but rough and 
ill-fitting clothes. Now he proposed to look like 
a legislator, so, hateful as borrowing was to him, 
he went to a well-to-do friend and asked him to 
lend him enough money to buy a complete outfit 
— a broadcloth suit, a satin waistcoat and stock, a 
high hat. When he arrived in Vandalia there was 
nothing in his appearance to discredit Sangamon 
County. 

Luckily for him, the chief interest of the Assem- 
bly when he entered was transportation — a matter 
on which he had thought much. Up to this time Lin- 
coln had seen no practical method but improving 
the rivers. Railroads would cost too much. At 
one time, when there had been talk of building a 
short line connecting Sangamon County with the 
Mississippi, he had said in a speech, "However high 
our imaginations may be heated at thoughts of 
a railroad, there is a heart-appalling shock accom- 
panying the amount of its cost." The sum which 
gave Lincoln this shock was $290,000 ! 

But by the time he reached the Assembly, things 
had changed in the country. There had been an 
enormous increase in population. Population meant 
wealth — wealth, if they could have railroads. So, 
without much consideration of how they were going 



100 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

to pay for them, the legislators began laying out 
railroads in every direction. Practically every town 
in Illinois — and even some settlements that could 
scarcely be called towns — sent delegations to the 
capital, asking for a railroad. It was easy enough 
to put it on paper, so down It went until the State 
was crossed and crisscrossed In every direction with 
hopeful plans. 

Of course there was no way of paying for all this 
except by credit, and quite as freely as they had made 
their paper railways, they now voted bonds. Lin- 
coln was carried away as thoroughly as the rest 
of his colleagues, voting charters and credits with- 
out limit. A confident, hopeful citizen, his new 
colleagues thought him, one who believed in the 
State and was willing to agree to anything which 
promised to help in Its development. It was not 
long, however, before they began to see that he was 
something more, that he had In him the makings 
of an unusual political leader. The capital of Illi- 
nois at that time, Vandalla, was In the southern part 
of the State. The population of the north was in- 
creasing every day, and there began to be loud com- 
plaints about the inconvenience of traveling so far 
to get to the Assembly. It soon became certain 
that there must be a change, and of course at once 
there were many candidates in the field for the 
prize. Among these was Springfield, In Sangamon 
County. It was a small, unkempt town, with no 
communication with the rest of the world except by 
the poorest of poor roads; but its geographical po- 



The Call of His Country loi 

sition was ideal — particularly in the minds of the 
Sangamon delegation. This group of men, known 
as the "Long Nine" because their average height 
was around six feet, and their average weight some- 
thing over two hundred pounds, was as big in 
energy and brains as in body, and they rushed the 
capital as if it had been a football. 

Lincoln from the start of their dash showed a 
shrewdness, a quickness of wit, and a power of per- 
suasion that delighted the "Long Nine" as much 
as it dismayed the rival delegations. He had a qual- 
ity of great value in politics, and that was a sense 
of what the other fellow would probably do ; it made 
it possible for him to get ahead of him. To secure 
the prize for Springfield he was willing to do every- 
thing but be dishonest. When it came to securing 
a vote by promising something that he could not ful- 
fill or by a trade which he felt to be unfair, the 
"Long Nine" soon learned that they could not count 
on Lincoln. Urged at one critical point in the cam- 
paign to consent to a bit of logrolling which he con- 
sidered wrong, he broke forth in an indignant re- 
fusal that the legislators never forgot. It was a 
convincing demonstration that you could not buy 
Lincoln. 

Sangamon County carried off the capital, after a 
lively fight; and it was Lincoln's leadership that 
did it, so everybody declared. 

The people saw that he was a leader, but they 
soon learned that when it came to a matter of con- 
viction he was not the kind of leader that steps softly. 



102 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

In a question of right or wrong, he would go out 
of his way, if necessary, to let people know his opin- 
ion. 

Illinois was much excited in the late 30's over the 
growth of abolition sentiment in the State. The 
Assembly, to discourage this, passed a resolution 
saying, among other things, that they heartily dis- 
approved of the formation of abolition societies and 
of the doctrines taught by them, that they believed 
the right of property in slaves to be sacred to the 
slave-holding States, and that the general govern- 
ment had no power to abolish slavery in the District 
of Columbia, as the Abolitionists were asking should 
be done. 

Lincoln and one of his friends refused to vote 
for this resolution; and, not content with that, they 
put in a protest declaring that while they believed 
the institution of slavery to be founded on both in- 
justice and bad policy, they considered that abolition 
agitation tended rather to increase than to abate its 
evils. They added that Congress, in their judg- 
ment, did have the right to abolish slavery in the 
District of Columbia, although it had not power 
to interfere with it in the States where it then 
existed. 

It took a brave man to take this stand publicly 
at that moment. Lincoln might easily have said 
nothing and quieted his conscience simply by a vote, 
but he preferred to make it clear to every one just 
where he stood on every point in the dispute. 

That is, before his service in the legislature was 
over, he had definitely stamped on the minds of the 



The Call of His Country 103 

people of his State the kind of politician he was 
— clever, ingenious, interested, long-sighted, rigidly 
honest, and courageous in matters of right and 
wrong. He showed these same qualities in his cam- 
paigning outside of the Assembly. No man was 
harder to trap. He was quick to see the weakness 
or the falsity of an opponent's argument or action, 
and was equally quick in his attack. He never al- 
lowed an insinuation against his own political honor 
to go unchallenged. One of his opponents once 
hinted publicly that he knew things about Lincoln 
which, if told, would ruin his chance of reelection; 
but he liked the young man and would do him the 
favor of not telling. 

Lincoln lost no time in replying to this sneaking 
attack. 

"No one has needed favors more than I," he 
wrote the gentleman, "and generally few have been 
less unwilling to accept them, but in this case favor 
to me would be injustice to the public, and therefore 
I beg your pardon for declining it. If I have done 
anything, by design or by misadventure, which, if 
known, would subject me to forfeiture of the con- 
fidence of the people of Sangamon County, he that 
knows that thing and conceals it is a traitor to his 
country's interests. I find myself wholly unable to 
form any conjecture of what fact or facts, real or 
supposed, you speak. I am flattered with the re- 
gard you manifest for me, but I do hope that on 
mature reflection you will view the public interest as 
of paramount consideration and therefore let the 
worst come. 



104 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

"I wish an answer to this, and you are at liberty 
to publish both if you choose." 

He never got an answer, and the gentleman 
stopped his hinting. 

On another occasion, after Lincoln had made a 
very able speech, sustaining the Whigs against their 
great rival of those days, the Democrats, a promi- 
nent Democrat — who had once been a Whig and had 
gone over to the other side — angered by Lincoln's 
arguments, proceeded to answer him in a conde- 
scending manner. "The young man would have to 
be taken down," he said, "he was assuming too 
much. He was sorry, but he would have to do it." 

He was a much older man than Lincoln. He was 
able and prosperous, owning the best house in 
Springfield and the only one which carried a light- 
ning rod. Lincoln, indignant at the patronizing 
tone of his opponent, answered him. 

"The gentleman announced that the young man 
would have to be taken down," he said. "It is 
for my fellow citizens, not for me, to say whether I 
am to be up or down. I desire to live, and I desire 
place and distinction; but I would rather die than, 
like the gentleman, live to see the day that I would 
change my politics for an ofiice worth three thou- 
sand dollars a year and then feel compelled to erect 
a lightning rod to protect a guilty conscience from 
an offended God." 

Whig Springfield and Sangamon County went wild 
over the reply, and the gentleman for the rest of 
his life never appeared in a political group that 
somebody did not say "Lightning Rod." 



The Call of His Country 105 

Lincoln's skill in making his political enemies ri- 
diculous sometimes led him a little far. He was 
frequently merciless when he found he could tease 
a political opponent. Once he narrowly escaped 
ruining his political future by indulging this pro- 
pensity. 

Among the Democratic officials of the State in 
1842 was James Shields, a quick-tempered Irish- 
man, courageous but vain and overconfident — just 
the kind of game that Lincoln loved to hunt. The 
Whigs at that moment were very much disturbed 
because the Democratic officials had decided that 
State taxes could not be paid in State bank notes but 
must be paid in silver. There was a reason for this. 
The State's money had greatly depreciated largely 
because of the extravagant schemes for internal im- 
provement that the legislature had voted in its re- 
cent sessions — schemes in which Lincoln had taken 
his full part. The State officers did not propose to be 
paid in depreciated currency. The Whigs con- 
tended that this was disloyal, and Lincoln attacked 
the order in a letter to the local Whig paper, signed 
"Aunt Rebecca." In this letter he ridiculed Shields' 
swagger and vanity. 

Shields was furious at being selected as the target 
for Democratic policies. The matter, however, 
might have passed off without any serious conse- 
quences if two young ladies in the town — one of 
whom, Mary Todd, afterward became Lincoln's 
wife — had not seized this opportunity to poke still 
further fun at Shields. He was a gallant man — too 
gallant, so the young ladies of Springfield thought 



io6 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

— and under the same signature that Lincoln had 
used, "Aunt Rebecca," they sent several letters to 
the paper. 

When Shields read these, his anger knew no 
bounds. He was going to challenge the man that 
was guilty of them, and demanded his name from 
the editor. The editor, not willing to bring the 
young ladies into the trouble, appealed to Lincoln. 
"Give him my name," Lincoln said, "and in no case 
that of the girls." 

Without approaching Lincoln as to whether or 
not he really was the author of the articles. Shields 
wrote an angry letter, demanding a "full, positive, 
and absolute retraction of all offensive allusions," 
as well as an apology for what he declared were 
insults. Unless this was forthcoming at once, then 
Lincoln must take the consequences, which, of course, 
meant a duel. 

Lincoln was calm enough. He sent back word 
that since Shields had not taken the trouble to ask 
him whether or no he was the author of the arti- 
cles, had not pointed out what was offensive in 
them, and had threatened consequences, he could 
not answer : that he must either withdraw this note 
or submit a challenge. Shields was altogether too 
angry to withdraw, and a challenge was forth- 
coming. 

According to usage, this left with Lincoln, the 
challenged party, the choice of weapons, position, 
time, and place. He promptly laid them down. In 
reading them, remember that Shields was a little 
man, with a reach of arm that went with his height; 



The Call of His Country 1 07 

that Lincoln was six feet four, with an unusually 
long arm: 

"First. Weapons: Cavalry broadswords of the 
largest size, precisely equal in all respects, and such 
as now used by the cavalry company at Jacksonville. 

"Second. Position: A plank ten feet long, and 
from nine to twelve inches broad, to be firmly fixed 
on edge, on the ground, as the line between us, 
which neither is to pass his foot over on forfeit 
of his life. Next a line drawn on the ground on 
either side of said plank and parallel with it, each 
at the distance of the whole length of the sword and 
three feet additional from the plank; and the pass- 
ing of his own such line by either party during the 
fight shall be deemed a surrender of the contest. 

"Third. Time: On Thursday evening at five 
o'clock, if you can get it so; but in no case to be at 
a greater distance of time than Friday evening at 
five o'clock. 

"Fourth. Place : Within three miles of Alton, on 
the opposite side of the river (the Mississippi), the 
particular spot to be agreed on by you." 

There was nothing to do but for Shields to ac- 
cept; and indeed, in his temper, he asked nothing 
better. 

On the day set, the duelists with their seconds 
drove their old-fashioned buggies into Alton, broad- 
swords rattling on the bottom. They promptly 
crossed the river to a sand bar belonging to the 
Missouri mainland. Things looked very serious,. 
The rumor that a duel was to be fought spread 
around Alton, and numbers of people came down 



lo8 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

to the banks and a few who could get skiffs started 
to row to the scene. 

Lincoln was very grave. He made no jokes now. 
Indeed, some of his friends believed that he was 
beginning to be frightened, so quiet was he; but 
presently one of them saw him reach over and pick 
up one of the swords, draw it from its scabbard, 
and feel along the weapon with his finger as a barber 
feels the edge of his razor. Then rising, he stretched 
out his long arm and clipped off a twig from a 
branch high above his head. There was not a man 
in the party who could reach anywhere near that 
twig, and the absurdity of that long-reaching fel- 
low fighting with Shields, who could walk under his 
arm, almost drove his seconds into hysterics. 

The plank had been set, the lines drawn, when 
suddenly from across the Mississippi there appeared 
a group of influential friends and acquaintances of 
both men. They had heard rumors of what was 
going on, and realizing what a tragedy might re- 
sult, had hastened to Alton, arriving just in the nick 
of time. Taking Shields aside, by dint of per- 
suasion and argument they induced him to withdraw 
his first note. After that it was easy to adjust the 
trouble "with honor to all concerned" ; and it was 
not long before the duelists were on their way home, 
chatting pleasantly. 

The party did not come back to the Illinois shore, 
however, without playing a practical joke on the 
crowd that had gathered on the banks. As they 
approached, the watchers saw lying in the bottom 
of one of the boats what seemed to be a bloody 



The Call of His Country 109 

figure. Beside him sat friends, one of them with 
a big fan which he was diligently plying. There was 
great excitement on the shore as to whether it was 
Lincoln or Shields that was wounded. But as the 
boat drew up they saw the supposed man was a big 
log covered with a red flannel shirt; and that Lin- 
coln and Shields, both of them sound, were heartily 
enjoying the joke played on the crowd. 

It was a lucky escape for Lincoln. "I didn't in- 
tend to hurt Shields," he told one of his friends, 
"unless I did so clearly in self-defense. If it had 
been necessary, I could have split him from the 
crown of his head to the end of his backbone." It 
was a good lesson for him — one that he needed. He 
never got over being ashamed of the affair and when 
it was mentioned his friends noted that he was very 
quick to divert attention by telling a story that led 
in some other direction. And never in his later 
history do we find him provoking an antagonist by 
ridicule in his early merciless way. 

The episode had a bearing, he soon found, on 
his political fortunes. He had refused reelection 
to the legislature in 1840, thinking that the time had 
come when he might take the next step upward in 
his political career; that is, seek an election to Con- 
gress. There was every reason for him to believe 
that he would be successful. His popularity, par- 
ticularly in his own county, was great, he was be- 
coming throughout the State more and more a fa- 
vorite for serious political discussions. His friends 
were warm and sympathetic with his ambition, and 
so in 1842 he tried for the nomination. 



iio Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

But he was not the only man in the Whig party 
that wanted the nomination to Congress. There 
were two other candidates, intimate friends of his 
— Edward D. Baker and John J. Hardin. Both of 
them were men of honor, popular in the community, 
excellent lawyers. Here was a new test for Lin- 
coln. What would he do now that he had friends 
as rivals? Would he sacrifice them to his ambi- 
tion? Could he keep his ambition and keep his 
friends? How was a man to act in such a situa- 
tion? Lincoln soon discovered how serious a trial 
he had before him — a trial which was going to prove 
just how stanch his loyalty was, just how genuine 
his honor. 

In the first move in the campaign in 1842, he 
lost; that is, he was defeated by his own Sangamon 
delegation, Baker being selected in his place. One 
reason for his defeat was that he was a duelist. 
Public opinion was severe against the practice, which 
still prevailed in some parts of the country and which 
right-thinking people were doing their utmost en- 
tirely to destroy. Lincoln was not at all embit- 
tered by his friend's success, but threw himself heart- 
ily into the campaign to elect him. When they came 
to the convention where the matter was decided, it 
was not Baker but the third in the trio, Hardin, who 
was nominated. Lincoln took quick action. There 
were three of them, all wanting to go to Congress. 
Why should they not take turns? And he asked 
that the convention put itself on record as favoring 
Baker — not himself, notice, but Baker — for the 
next session- that of 1844. This was quickly done. 



The Call of His Country ill 

although Hardin's friends resented the maneuver. 
It made a second term for their candidate out of 
the question. 

In 1844 Lincoln did not present himself but 
worked as persistently for Baker as he would have 
done for himself. Baker was elected, and almost 
at once Lincoln began to lay the foundation for his 
own nomination in 1846. He was convinced that 
the principle of "turn about is fair play" applied to 
this case. Baker's friends had accepted it. He had 
rather taken it for granted that Hardin and his 
friends accepted it, but he had not been long work- 
ing on his campaign before he discovered that here 
he was wrong, that Hardin really wanted a renomi« 
nation. Lincoln was hurt, and a little indignant. 

"If neither of us had been to Congress," he told 
his friends, "or If we both had, it would only ac- 
cord with what I have always done, for the sake 
of peace, to give way to him; and I expect I should 
do it. But to yield to Hardin under present circum- 
stances seems to me as nothing less than yielding to 
one who would gladly sacrifice me altogether. This 
I would rather not submit to." Sore as he felt, he 
was determined that there should be no quarrel, and 
he constantly warned his friends not to criticize 
Hardin — "Nothing can be said against him," he 
kept declaring. "He is talented, energetic, unusu- 
ally generous, and magnanimous. Make no argu- 
ment but that 'turn about Is fair play.' " Fortu- 
nately, Hardin was magnanimous, and when he 
realized how much his rival was taking the matter 
to heart, he withdrew. 



112 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

At the next election, 1846, Lincoln's ambition was 
realized: he was a congressman. 

It was in November of 1847 that he started for 
Washington. It was an exciting trip for him, for 
never before had he been farther east than Indiana. 
The only cities that he had seen up to that time 
were New Orleans and St. Louis : Chicago was still 
too small, too much of a home product to be counted 
as a city. Washington itself was not much more 
than a big rambling village. The wings of the 
Capitol had not been built. The dome and the 
great terraces were unfinished. Washington's 
monument was only halfway up. Most of the pop- 
ulation lived on Capitol Hill and the near-by streets. 
The great development out toward the northwest 
had not yet begun. The streets were unpaved. It 
was a barren, slovenly town; but nothing of this 
Lincoln realized. It was the capital of the country 
he loved to which he was going, and it was among 
the men who were running that country that he 
was now to sit. 

He was not long in making friends. His kindli- 
ness, his gift for story-telling, his sound sense, and 
thorough familiarity with both the history and the 
affairs of the land, as well as his skill in argument, 
men quickly noted, and because of them sought his 
acquaintance. Daniel Webster, whose Sunday- 
morning breakfasts were among the most popular 
social affairs in Washington, soon was asking Lin- 
coln as a regular guest. He was asked to join the 
"Young Indian Club" — a group of congressmen in- 
terested in the discussion of national questions. It 



The Call of His Country 113 

was in this club that he first debated with older and 
abler men the idea of State sovereignty, one of his 
chief antagonists being Alexander Stephens, a man 
who, later, was to be a leader in the effort to prove 
by force the soundness of this idea. 

The newspaper correspondents, too, discovered 
Lincoln, and reported him as the best story-teller 
in Congress. One of his favorite haunts, and one 
where he made many friends among public men, was 
a bowling alley. Lincoln never was long in a place 
that he did not look for some active sport. Bowl- 
ing gave him just what he wanted, and as often as 
it was possible for him to find time he joined the 
matched games in an alley on Capitol Hill, near the 
boarding house where he lived with many other mem- 
bers of Congress. He was an awkward bowler but 
played with great zest, and solely for exercise and 
amusement. He always took success or defeat with 
equal good nature. His playing was punctuated by 
amusing comments and illustrations. The fame of 
him as a bowler soon spread, and when it was known 
that he was in the alley people were sure to gather 
to listen to his jokes and stories. 

He was not slow in winning respect in Congress, 
for he set himself at once to hard work, mastering 
the congressional procedure, acquainting himself 
with the men and their methods, and thoroughly 
studying the questions on which he must give a vote. 

The question which took most of his time was 
the very serious one of the war with Mexico over 
Texas. He had opposed the war, which had begun 
in the spring of 1846, and had done so from the 



114 ^oy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

start of the quarrel. He went to Washington, in- 
tending to support the war in every particular ex- 
cept that of declaring it right; but the administra- 
tion wanted not only support, it wanted approval, 
Lincoln would not give this. He not only refused 
to vote that he believed the war justified, but he 
boldly declared that the United States had been the 
aggressor, and he challenged the administration to 
prove the contrary. It was unpopular talk, and 
even in Springfield, where they knew his record best, 
his Whig friends — even his friend and law partner, 
Mr. Herndon — cautioned him. 

Lincoln answered hotly- "Would you have voted 
what you felt and knew to be a lie? I know you 
would not. Would you have gone out of the House 
— skulked the vote? You are compelled to speak 
and your only alternative is to tell the truth or a 
lie. This vote has nothing to do in determining 
my votes on the question of supplies. I have al- 
ways intended and still intend to vote supplies." 

Unpopular as his position was he persisted in it. 
The Mexican War was wrong, the United States had 
been the aggressor; and, since this was so, he would 
not pretend otherwise. 

When the war was won and the great Western 
territory, including not only what we now know as 
Texas but New Mexico and California, was ad- 
mitted to the Union there came to the front the 
question that all thoughtful men had dreaded: 
Was the territory to be free or slave? It was con- 
stantly coming up in Congress. Lincoln voted prob- 
ably forty times, in the course of his term, for mak- 




The Earliest Known Portrait of Lincoln. About 1848. Age 39 

From the original daguerreotype owned by Mr. Lincoln's son, the Hon. 
Robert T. Lincoln. 



The Call of His Country 115 

ing the territory free; and he boldly stated his posi- 
tion whenever the opportunity allowed. Not only 
that, but, as many of his friends thought, he went 
out of his way to declare for the exclusion of slavery 
from the District of Columbia. 

In the campaign of 1848 he kept this up; and 
more and more certain did it become as his term 
drew to a close that he would not get a chance for 
renomination even if he should ask it. His bold- 
ness was not all that hurt him. It had turned out 
that he was not a good wirepuller, could not get of- 
fices for his friends in the way they had expected. 
As a matter of fact, Lincoln was poor at this kind 
of business. If a man did not seem to him fit for 
a position he was very liable to tell him so; or, if 
he did put in his application, to do it with such a 
candid statement of his client's merits as to ruin 
his chances. He had a strong feeling that fitness 
was the chief reason for giving a man an office. He 
could not be an enthusiastic supporter of anybody 
simply because he owed him a vote. It was under 
something of a cloud, then — at least in political 
circles — that he ended his term in Congress in the 
spring of 1849 and came back to Illinois. 

To be sure, he had had a wonderful time. He 
had seen not only Washington, but in the campaign 
of 1848, between the two sessions, he had been 
asked to go to New England to make speeches for 
the Whig presidential candidate, General Taylor, 
and there he had met a number of prominent men. 
On his way home he had done a little sight-seeing, 
had been to Niagara Falls and felt all of its over- 



Ii6 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

whelming grandeur. He planned some day to tell 
in a lecture what he had seen and felt in face of the 
great waters, and made notes which are to be found 
among his published papers. After leaving Niagara 
he had a little adventure that set his wits working in 
an entirely different direction. 

The boat on which he was traveling was stranded 
on a sand bar. The captain had ordered all the 
empty barrels and boxes on board to be forced un- 
der the side of the boat. These empty receptacles 
acted as a buoy, and in a little time the vessel swung 
clear. Lincoln was greatly Interested In the opera- 
tion and hardly was he back In Springfield before he 
began tinkering on a device for taking care of just 
such an accident. He spent hours in a little car- 
penter shop near his office, working on a model; 
and finally, when he went back to Washington for 
the remainder of his term, he took it along and se- 
cured a patent. This model sits on the shelves of 
the Patent Office to-day. 

When Lincoln returned to Springfield in the spring 
of 1849, it looked as if his political fortunes were 
at an end. He did not whine or sulk. He did not 
announce that he was suffering for doing what he 
thought was right. He took what had happened 
quietly and good-naturedly. Lincoln never had any 
sympathy with people who nourished a grudge 
against the public for their defeats and failures. He 
had a law partner, younger than himself, who was 
inclined to feel that he was being kept down In the 
world by older men. Mr. Lincoln chlded him for 
his complaining. 



The Call of His Country 117 

"The way for a young man to rise," he told him, 
"is to improve himself every way he can, never sus- 
pecting that any one wishes to hinder him. Sus- 
picion and jealousy never did help any man in any 
situation. There may sometimes be ungenerous at- 
tempts to keep a young man down — and they will 
succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted 
from its true channel, to brood over the attempted 
injury." 

Lincoln did not brood now; he worked harder 
than he ever had before to make a good lawyer of 
himself. For the next five years his attention was 
occupied almost entirely with legal matters. If you 
will examine his published letters and speeches for 
this particular five years, and compare them with the 
periods of equal length just before and just after, 
you will realize how completely politics had dropped 
out of his life. The probability is that he would 
have gone on with the law, giving no more attention 
to public affairs than any good citizen should give, 
in his judgment, refusing public office if it came his 
way, devoted to his profession, if there had not sud- 
denly been presented to Congress a bill seeking to 
overthrow the solemn engagement known as the 
Missouri Compromise, into which the people of the 
United States had entered over thirty years before. 
This compromise provided that there should be no 
slaves north of 36° 30' north latitude in the vast 
territory running from the Gulf of Mexico to Can- 
ada and as far west as the Rocky Mountains, bought 
by the United States in 1803 from France. In Lin- 
coln's judgment, to repeal this arrangement was not 



ii8 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

only a violation of sacred obligations which the coun- 
try had taken, but was directly opposed to the in- 
tent of the men who had founded the country. 

What should he do? To attack the bill meant 
that he must turn his mind from his profession, that 
he must give time and strength which he could ill 
afford to give. It was doubtful if there was po- 
litical honor in the struggle, for he saw that to take 
the stand that he must take would be unpopular with 
many of the people of Illinois. He did not hesitate. 
Cost what it might, he did not propose that the 
Missouri Compromise should be repealed, that ter- 
ritory long ago set aside for freedom by the will of 
the people of the country should be open to slavery. 

Possibly he was the more willing to go into the 
fight because the repeal of the Missouri Compro- 
mise had been fathered by his strongest political 
enemy in the State of Illinois, the man of whom Lin- 
coln, if he was ever jealous of anybody, was jealous, 
and that was the senior senator from Illinois, 
Stephen A. Douglas. If you must fight, it is well to 
have an opponent that brings out all your strength. 
Lincoln knew that he had such an opponent, and he 
made ready for what was to be the fight of his life. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE FIGHT OF HIS LIFE 

Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just. 

Shakespeare. 

WHEN Lincoln, In 1854, went into what was 
to be the fight of his life, he did it because 
he believed that he was right and that if 
he could get a chance he could make the people of 
Illinois agree that he was right. The question 
which stirred him so mightily was whether or not 
the United States should allow slavery to be ex- 
tended into territory where it did not then exist, 
and where it had been agreed thirty years before 
it should never be allowed to go. Lincoln believed 
that this could not lawfully be done. He knew that 
the men who organized the Union, the men that we 
speak of as the "Fathers," had believed that if they 
stopped the slave trade, as they did, and shut up 
slavery in a certain number of states, it would finally 
die a natural death. That is, they believed that 
property if it is to live must have room in which to 
grow, also that it must have the tolerance and 
friendly recognition of all of the people of the coun- 
try where it exists. Lincoln had always held this 
view. 

At the same time, he had never agreed with the 
119 



120 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

Abolitionists who were trying to destroy slavery in 
the States where it was legal. He insisted that the 
free States should let the slavery of the other States 
alone, let it die of itself. Nor did he hate the peo- 
ple of the South as many of the Abolitionists did 
because of slavery. They found slavery there when 
they were born, he argued. "They are just what 
we would be in their situation. If slavery did not 
exist among them, they would not introduce it. If 
it did now exist among us, we should not instantly 
give it up. I surely will not blame them for not 
doing what I should not know how to do myself." 

But if he did not hate the South he did hate slav- 
ery — thought it a terrible wrong; and it was be- 
cause of this hatred that he was ready to throw aside 
his law practice in 1854 to go into what he realized 
would be a long and terrible struggle. 

The man who had brought on the fight was an old 
antagonist of his, Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas 
had walked into Illinois from the East, his coat over 
his arm, in those years when Lincoln was carrying 
a log chain and reading law at night. The two 
first came together in 1836 in the State Assembly. 
You could hardly find two men more different in 
looks and in their ways of getting on. Douglas was 
a stout little man, only 5 feet 4 inches tall — Lincoln 
was 6 feet 4 — he had a great mane of black hair 
and when he spoke he often roared like a lion. 
Douglas had all the qualities which win men. He 
was handsome, confident, gay, eloquent; and he was 
willing to go along with anybody who would help 



The Fight of His Life 12 1 

him to get what he wanted. He was wonderfully 
able as a politician, adroit and brilliant as a speaker; 
but no one would ever have thought of applying to 
him the term which always followed Lincoln, that 
of "honest." 

At the start the two men were rivals. They be- 
longed to the same Springfield debating club, where 
they were frequently pitted against each other. 
They differed in politics, Lincoln being a Whig and 
Douglas a Democrat; and in times of campaigning 
spoke from the same platform or followed each 
other over the same territory. They were even 
rivals for the hand of the same woman, it is said, 
the woman who became later Mr. Lincoln's wife. 
But Douglas soon left Lincoln far behind. He was 
given important State offices, was elected to the Su- 
preme Bench of the State and three times to Con- 
gress. He was a senator of the United States, and 
one of the most distinguished and popular figures 
in the country, when, in 1847, Lincoln arrived in 
Washington, an unknown man. 

By 1854 Douglas was regarded as a future Presi- 
dent. He knew how good his chances were, and 
he was intent on doing everything that he could to 
enlarge them. To win he must have the favor of 
the South. He understood the desire of a large 
part of the slaveholders of the South to have new 
territory for their property. He knew if he could 
give it to them that he would have their support. 
At that time he was the head of the Senate commit- 
tee on territorial organization. Two new territo- 



122 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

ries, Kansas and Nebraska — both of which, you will 
remember, were inside the line which by the Mis- 
souri Compromise was to be forever free — wanted 
to be organized. It was the business of his com- 
mittee to introduce a bill arranging this. Douglas 
tacked on to this bill an amendment which left it to 
the people of the territories, and to the new States 
which might be formed from them, to decide whether 
they wanted to be free or slave. "This was right," 
he said, "it was popular sovereignty." A little later 
he consented, rather reluctantly, to a second amend- 
ment repealing the Missouri Compromise. 

When the North learned of Douglas' action, it 
broke out in anger and revolt. Particularly was 
Illinois amazed and Indignant. He was their man, 
their great man, their "Little Giant," as they popu- 
larly called him. Could it be possible that he had 
so misunderstood their feeling about slavery that he 
would wantonly, and apparently for no other rea- 
son than to Increase his own popularity In a section 
of the country which naturally mistrusted him be- 
cause he was a Northern man, break a contract which 
most of them regarded as sacred as the articles of 
the Constitution? 

As we have seen, nobody was more stirred by the 
news of the repeal than Abraham Lincoln. He 
could think of nothing else. He went over in his 
mind the whole experience of the country with slav- 
ery — the efforts to confine it, the efforts to spread 
it, the bitterness that had been born In both North 
and South because of the struggle. Would It never 
rest? Was the hope and belief of the "Fathers" 



The Fight of His Life 123 

that if it were confined it would ultimately die of 
itself — a false hope? Must this dangerous struggle 
go on forever? 

As he went about the circuit, he talked of noth- 
ing else. It was the last thing at night and the first 
thing in the morning. He was gradually coming, 
in his own mind, to a conclusion, terrible to himself 
and so terrible to others that many of his best friends 
refused to listen to him when he talked of it — and 
that was, that it was impossible for the Union to 
exist half slave and half free. Once on the circuit, 
one of his friends tells of waking up early in the 
morning and seeing him sitting on the edge of the 
bed in his long nightshirt. "I tell you," Lincoln 
broke out when he saw his friend was awake, "this 
country cannot exist much longer half slave and halt 
free." "Oh, go to sleep, Lincoln," his friend re- 
plied. 

Douglas came back in the fall, after he had put 
through his Kansas-Nebraska bill, as it came to be 
called, to try to explain to the Illinois people what 
he had done. He started in Chicago, and they 
howled him down, though he fought half the night 
with them. It was a new experience for the "Little 
Giant," accustomed as he had always been to ap- 
plause and congratulations. But he was no coward; 
and he started out through the State to defend him- 
self. 

In October he came to Springfield. It was the 
week of the State fair, and he had a great audience, 
on which he used all his tremendous power of elo- 
quence and persuasion. "Why, why," he pleaded, 



124 ^oy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

"should any one object to allowing the people of a 
State to regulate their own affairs, to choose the 
kind of property they want — have slaves or not? 
Was not that their right?" 

Lincoln had been asked to answer Douglas. His 
speech, four hours long, is one of the most impor- 
tant of his life, for in it he marshaled like a general 
the army of arguments he had been gathering in his 
months of hard thinking. The result was an amaze- 
ment to everybody, friend or foe, and particularly 
did it take hold of young men. Among those in 
his audience was a boy of twenty, Horace White by 
name. This boy had never in his life heard any- 
thing before that so moved him; and years later, 
when he had become one of the most influential 
editors in this country, he drew a picture of the scene, 
which you can take as a true picture of Lincoln not 
only at this time, but in other great speeches which 
he was to make. 

"It was a warmish day in early October," Hor- 
ace White says, "and Mr. Lincoln was In his shirt 
sleeves when he stepped on the platform. I ob- 
served that, although awkward, he was not in the 
least embarrassed. He began in a low and hesitat- 
ing manner, but without any mistakes of language, 
dates, or facts. It was evident that he had mas- 
tered his subject, that he knew what he was going 
to say, and that he knew he was right. He had a 
thin, high-pitched, falsetto voice of much carrying 
power, and could be heard a long distance In spite 
of the bustle and tumult of the crowd. He had the 
accent and pronunciation peculiar to his native State, 



The Fight of His Life 125 

Kentucky. Gradually he warmed up with his sub- 
ject, his angularity disappeared, and he passed into 
that attitude of unconscious majesty that is so con- 
spicuous in Saint Gaudens' statue at the entrance 
of Lincoln Park in Chicago. . . . Progressing with 
his theme, his words began to come faster and his 
face to light up with the rays of genius and his body 
to move in unison with his thoughts. His gestures 
were made with his body and head rather than with 
his arms. They were the natural expression of the 
man, and so perfectly adapted to what he was say- 
ing that anything different would have been quite in- 
conceivable. Sometimes his manner was very im- 
passioned, and he seemed transfigured with his sub- 
ject. Perspiration would stream down his face, and 
each particular hair would stand on end. ... In 
such transfigured moments as these he was the type 
of the Hebrew prophet. 

"I heard the whole speech. It was superior to 
Webster's reply to Hayne, because its theme is 
loftier and its scope wider. ... I think also that 
Lincoln's speech is the superior of the two as an 
example of English style. It lacks something of the 
smooth, compulsive flow which takes the intellect 
captive in the Websterian diction, but it excels in 
the simplicity, directness, and lucidity which appeal 
both to the intellect and to the heart. The speech 
made so profound an impression on me that I feel 
under its spell to this day." 

A few days later the two men met again, this time 
at Peoria; and went over the same arguments. 
Douglas sat in the front row and heard Lincoln an- 



126 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

swer his eloquent plea to let each State decide what 
kind of property it wanted — to govern itself as it 
pleased. 

"What Mr. Douglas means," retorted Lincoln, 
"is that as you do not object to my taking my hog to 
Nebraska therefore I must not object to your taking 
your slave. I admit this is perfectly logical if there 
is no difference between hogs and negroes. . . . 
The doctrine of self-government is right, but it has 
no application as here attempted. When the white 
man governs himself, that is self-government; but 
when he governs himself and also governs another 
man, that is not self-government, that is despotism. 
No man is good enough to govern another man with- 
out that man's consent. I say this is the leading 
principle, the sheet anchor of American Republi- 
canism." 

Lincoln's terrible seriousness, the closeness of his 
argument, the intentness of his great audience, filled 
Douglas, listening there in the front row, with 
alarm. Lincoln was digging under his foundations. 
If he kept this up, he saw that his own house might 
be falling over his head. And so, after the lecture, 
he said to him, "Lincoln, you are giving me more 
trouble in debate than all the United States Senate. 
Let's quit and go home." And Lincoln, always ami- 
able — too amiable, his friends said — agreed. 

It was the end of the first round of the fight, and 
the honors were not with the great champion; they 
were with his unknown challenger. 

But if Douglas had any idea that when Lincoln 
accepted his suggestion that they "quit and go 



The Fight of His Life 127 

home" it was to be the end of the fight, he soon 
saw his mistake, for Lincoln went to work like a 
beaver to elect to office every candidate in Illinois, 
Democrat or Whig, opposed to the repeal of the 
Missouri Compromise. He began by offering him- 
self for the State Assembly, and was elected. Think- 
ing he had a chance to be made senator, he resigned 
and went out campaigning, speaking only on the sub- 
ject which had set his mind and soul aflame. When 
he found that he could not be nominated, but that 
an anti-Nebraska Democrat who was running against 
a Douglas Democrat could be if he gave up his 
chance, he did it. "Never mind about me," he told 
his friends. "We will have an anti-Nebraska sena- 
tor in Washington to fight Douglas." 

Douglas, watching from Washington, saw that, 
as the months went on, the opposition to him In 
Illinois was growing more and more serious. It 
was no longer a matter of scattered groups In the 
different political parties; these groups were getting 
together. In May, 1856, at Bloomlngton, they pub- 
licly broke from their old moorings and formed a 
new party — the Republican. 

Douglas realized how much Lincoln had to do 
with the making of this organization and its plat- 
form; he knew, too, that it was Lincoln who at this 
meeting, when the organization was completed, had 
made a speech that had brought his audience to its 
feet again and again with wild cheering — a speech 
so eloquent, passionate, and sincere that the very 
reporters taking notes for their newspapers threw 
down their pencils, forgot what they were there for 



128 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

and at the end found themselves standing on the 
tables, shouting at the top of their lungs. 

Because of their excitement, no report was made 
for the newspapers and all over Illinois the speech 
was known as "Lincoln's Lost Speech," and men who 
heard it told, as long as they lived, of its greatness. 
His law partner, Mr. Herndon, who like the report- 
ers, at the end of ten minutes threw down the pencil 
with which he was taking notes, declared that "If 
Mr. Lincoln was 6 feet and 4 inches high usually, at 
Bloomington that day he was 7 feet and inspired at 
that." 

An exciting summer followed the convention. 
The Republicans had their first full ticket — State and 
national — in the field, and the Illinois men of 
different parties who had united at Bloomington 
pulled together as if they had been trained from 
boyhood to the same political harness. Their reso-. 
lution and indignation was kept at white heat by 
the civil war that then raged in Kansas. The ter- 
ritory was soon to seek statehood under Douglas' 
bill, and between the settlers who were determined 
to make it a slave State and those who were equally 
determined it should remain free there was open 
warfare. 

In Illinois the Republicans proclaimed: "The 
Missouri Compromise must be restored, Kansas 
shall be free." With such campaign cries in a State 
so devoted to Douglas it was wonderful that there 
was no violence ; and that there was none was, in 
no small measure, due to Lincoln who constantly 
preached self-control to his associates and in his 



The Fight of His Life 129 

speeches kept to the hard, cold, unanswerable argu- 
ments which two years before had made Douglas 
cry, "Let us quit and go home." 

When November came, the unbelievable hap- 
pened in Illinois — the new party swept the State, 
electing its whole ticket. For the first time in his 
history, Douglas and his followers were defeated 
all along the line. A few months after the election 
things were made still worse for him by a decision 
of the Supreme Court of the United States which 
declared that the Missouri Compromise and all com- 
promises like it were unconstitutional — that Con- 
gress had no power to pass them — that it had no 
power to make territory free as it had tried to do. 
Slaves were property and a man could take his 
property where he wished. 

There was a fresh uproar in Illinois, as loud a 
one as there had been over Douglas' bill. Lincoln 
used the new move of the slavery party to strengthen 
the argument he had been building up. What was 
this last move, he asked, this Supreme Court de- 
cision but another timber for the frame of a house 
that they were preparing to build? See how ex- 
actly it fitted into the timber that Douglas had pre- 
pared! When we see a lot of frame timbers, dif- 
ferent portions of which we know have been gotten 
out at different times and places by different work- 
men, joined together and see them exactly make the 
frame of a house, we find it impossible not to be- 
lieve that the workmen are following a common 
plan. That is, you see that Lincoln was charging 
that Douglas and his party were in a conspiracy to 



130 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

extend slavery all over the country, into the old as 
well as the new States, the North as well as the 
South. Many of those who listened to him said to 
one another, "It does look like it. Maybe Lin- 
coln is right when he says we cannot exist much 
longer half slave and half free, that we must become 
all one or all the other." 

It was a serious thing for Douglas' ambition to 
have Illinois turning against him at this moment. 
His term as senator was about to end. If he were 
not reelected he would probably not have a chance 
at the presidency in i860 or 1864 as he had planned. 
He must do something. 

The chance came just in the nick of time. Kan- 
sas was ready to adopt a constitution according to 
Douglas' plan. The people were to have a free 
chance to vote whether they should or should not 
have slavery. By an outrageous fraud that nobody 
denied, a constitution "with slavery" was fixed on 
them, and Douglas' party — the President and all — 
refused to interfere. Douglas made a terrible scene 
in the Senate, speaking for three hours, defying his 
party and declaring he would never submit. He 
had promised Kansas that she should be perfectly 
free to choose. This had not been a free election. 
"Are you going to force it on them against their 
will," he said, "simply because they would vote it 
down if you had consulted them? Is that the mode 
in which I am called upon to carry out the principle 
of self-government? If Kansas wants a Slave con- 
stitution," he shouted, "she has a right to it; if she 
wants a Free-State constitution she has a right to 



The Fight of His Life 131 

it. It is none of my business which way the slavery 
clause is decided, / care not whether it is voted up or 
down." 

All through the North there was great rejoicing 
over Douglas' bold stand. He was for fair play, 
and many leading Republicans began to suggest tak- 
ing him into the party if the Democrats threw him 
over. They even hinted to the Republicans in Illi- 
nois that they accept him as their candidate for 
the Senate that fall. But the Republicans in Illinois 
knew Douglas too well. They looked on the at- 
tack he had made on his party for its stand in Kan- 
sas as a political trick timed exactly so as to win 
back his old followers. They knew that his revolt 
against the fraud did not touch the real question 
which was whether slavery was to be kept where the 
law had put it or was to be allowed to spread from 
new State to new State. And their answer to the 
suggestion that they join with the Democrats in re- 
turning him was to nominate Abraham Lincoln to 
run against him for the Senate. 

Douglas came back to Illinois to make his cam- 
paign in bad humor. He was uneasy. The coun- 
try outside might not know anything about this man 
he must meet; but he did. He knew that man had 
a dangerous habit in debate of springing new argu-. 
ments on you, of insisting you answer them, of pur- 
suing you if you did not or could not. He had the 
habit of asking questions which if you answered them 
in one way angered Illinois and if you answered them 
in another way angered the South. And, worst of 
all, this man was in dead earnest about the right 



132 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

and wrong of things. Lincoln cared whether slav- 
ery was voted up or down. He did not. If Lin- 
coln drove him too often into a corner and made the 
people see he did not care, that would be dangerous 
— in Illinois. 

But of all this he gave no sign. He set out in 
a special railway coach, gay with flags, a brass can- 
non mounted at the rear to announce his approach 
— for all the world like a conquering hero on a tri- 
umphal march. 

Lincoln camped on his trail, traveling as he could 
— now in an ordinary day coach, now in the caboose 
of a freight train, now driving across country, ham- 
mering incessantly at Douglas' position. He hoped 
to force Douglas to a challenge to debate. The 
"Little Giant" was wary. He did not want to speak 
from the same platform with his rival and when 
Lincoln realized this, he became the challenger. 
There was no escape; but, instead of accepting Lin- 
coln's proposition that they divide time everywhere 
for the rest of the campaign, Douglas named places 
at which he would meet Lincoln. These debates 
were to occur at intervals of about two weeks. 

At last the second round of the great fight was 
called. 

The great champion dreaded it. "I shall have 
my hands full," he told his friends privately. They 
pooh-poohed at the idea and boasted loudly of the 
great show that was coming: 

"The Little Giant chawing up Old Abe." 

Not a few of Lincoln's followers, much as they 
admired him, dreaded the encounter. Was Lin- 



The Fight of His Life 133 

coin, after all, fit to meet this big man — this man 
who had always won, who had long been a United 
States senator, who, right or wrong, probably would 
be President? Who was Lincoln that he should ac- 
tually challenge such a man? Lincoln felt, rather 
than heard, this fear in his friends' minds. Finally 
one of them told him in Springfield one day that the 
Republicans were looking forward to the debate 
which he had brought upon himself with deep con- 
cern. A shadow went over Mr. Lincoln's face. It 
quickly gave way to a blaze of eyes and a quiver 
of lips. 

"Sit down," he said to his friend, "and let me 
tell you a story. 

"You have seen two men about to fight?" 

"Yes, many times." 

"Well, one of them brags about what he means 
to do. He jumps high in the air, cracking his heels 
together, smites his list and wastes his breath trying 
to scare somebody. You see the other fellow, he 
says not a word." Here Mr. Lincoln's voice and 
manner changed to great earnestness and repeat- 
ing — "You see the other man, he says not a word. 
His arms are at his side, his fists are closely doubled 
up, his head is drawn to the shoulder, and his teeth 
are set firm together. He is saving his wind for 
the fight, and as sure as it comes off he will win it, 
or die a-trying." 

If you will take a map and locate the towns which 
Douglas had picked out for the great tournament — 
Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charlestown, Gales- 
boro, Quincy, Alton — you will see that by a little 



134 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

trouble anybody in the State could hear at least one 
of the debates. Nothing had ever happened in the 
lives of the boys of Illinois so exciting. It was like 
the World Series. Everybody turned out. Whole 
neighborhoods packed themselves into a prairie 
schooner or on a hay wagon drawn by four or six 
horses. They came in buggies, in barouches, on 
horseback, by rail, by canal; a boy walked bare- 
footed through the dust for miles rather than miss it. 

Most of them carried their food so that the de- 
bating point was like one grand picnic — streets, 
fields, hillsides crowded with campers. At every 
corner were fakirs and hucksters selling lemonade 
and pain killer, flags and badges, telling fortunes or 
making stump speeches. 

The debates came off in the afternoon, and long 
before the hour the great crowds would surge toward 
the stand — the boys pushing their way to the front, 
climbing to the roofs of any near-by house or near- 
by trees. 

For four years these boys had been listening to 
the great discussion. They had heard it at home, 
at school, in the streets, at political meetings. They 
knew what it was all about, and many of them could 
use the arguments for or against the extension of 
slavery as skillfully as their fathers, such was the 
constant training in debate that their schools gave. 
More than one of them, too, had finished his de- 
bate over the great question with his fists. And 
now they were to see the champions of the two sides. 
They were like boys who, having for years played 
baseball at home and with neighboring teams, come 



The Fight of His Life 135 

at last to see a game between national champions. 
What they were interested in was the men, and how 
they did it, how they handled themselves when they 
came to face each other. 

Each boy had chosen his leader, and was loud in 
his praise of him. It was natural that any boy 
should be proud to wear a Douglas badge. He was 
their "great man" — "the next President of the 
United States" — that was enough for many. But 
boys felt differently about Lincoln — they liked him, 
liked him because he liked them — always noticed 
them, talked to them when he had the chance — in- 
deed, sometimes even in the rush of the campaign, 
joined them for a few minutes at ball — told them 
a story or even treated them at the grocery. Many 
a boy — and girl — who heard one or more of the de- 
bates, loved to tell all during life of some little at- 
tention of Mr. Lincoln. Down at Jonesboro, a lit- 
tle girl, all dressed up for the great event, picked 
her way through the dust to do an errand in a gro- 
cery store. Mr. Lincoln sat inside and as she passed 
drew her to him. "She's an orphan," said the store- 
keeper. And the great man drew a dime from his 
pocket and slipped it into her hand. Do you sup- 
pose that she ever forgot that little act of sympathy 
and kindness? 

They liked his fun whether they were for Doug- 
las or for him, and many a one always remembered 
how at one debate when it came his turn to answer, 
he slipped off his long duster and said to a young 
girl beside him, "Please hold my coat while I stone 
Stephen." 



136 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

They liked the habit he had of giving them a smile 
quite their own if they came around with their father 
or some grown friend at a reception. At the last of 
the debates at Alton, a very much excited small boy, 
"effervescing with patriotic enthusiasm," as he de- 
scribed himself later, by the name of J. Henry Lea, 
went with his father to the hotel to congratulate 
Mr. Lincoln. A large group of the leading men 
of Illinois, men whose names are a part of the his- 
tory of the country, surrounded Mr. Lincoln, yet 
when the small boy was presented he found time to 
give him not only a cordial handclasp but to say a 
few special kind words to him. From that hour, so 
Mr. Lea wrote fifty years afterward, he was to him a 
"demigod." 

Mr. Lea became later a genealogist. Realizing 
that Lincoln was the only great American whose an- 
cestry had not been clearly established, and resent- 
ing that because of ignorance and partisanship so 
much scandal and misrepresentation had gathered 
about it, he set out to establish clearly by docu- 
ments the Lincoln pedigree. He worked for nearly 
thirty years on this task until finally he was able to 
establish an unbroken line from the farm where 
Lincoln was born in Kentucky, back through Vir- 
ginia, into Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, across 
the ocean to England, and back to one Robert Lin- 
coln who was born and died in Hingham, England, 
in the sixteenth century. 

When Mr. Lea published this work in 1908, he 
submitted it to the American people whom Lincoln 
loved so well "as a slight tribute to the memory of 



The Fight of His Life 137 

their best and wisest statesman, father, and friend." 
This was the kind of enthusiasm that the debates 
aroused in many a boy. 

Then he was always telling stories or giving il- 
lustrations either on the platform or as he talked 
to the groups gathered about that stuck in a boy's 
mind. A boy who heard Mr. Lincoln use his fa- 
mous snake illustration could not fail to understand 
why he objected to taking slaves into new terri- 
tory. "If I saw a venomous snake crawling in 
the road, any man would say I might seize the near- 
est stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed 
with my children, that would be another question. 
I might hurt the children more than the snake, and 
it might bite them. Much more if I found it in 
bed with my neighbor's children, and I had bound 
myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his 
children under any circumstances, it would become 
me to let that particular mode of getting rid of the 
gentleman alone. But if there was a bed newly 
made up, to which the children were to be taken, 
and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes 
and put them there with them, I take it no man would 
say there was any question how I ought to decide 1 

"That is just the case. The new territories are 
the newly made bed to which our children are to go, 
and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall 
have snakes mixed up with them or not. It does 
not seem as if there could be much hesitation what 
our policy should be I" 

One of the things that Mr. Lincoln was trying 
hardest in the debates to make Illinois understand 



138 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

was that Mr. Douglas had one kind of an argu- 
ment for the North and another for the South. 
More than one boy was able to see this by a story 
that he told of a man who had a very lazy pony. 
The man finally bought a pair of spurs, but they 
were not long of any use, for the moment the pony 
felt the prod he would stick out a forefoot and 
lie down. The owner decided that he would trade 
him off. He found a man with a fine horse and 
proceeded to tell him of the wonderful qualities of 
his pony. At the moment they were passing a 
clump of bushes where he saw some pheasants. He 
struck his spur into the pony who immediately put 
out his forefoot and lay down. "There are pheas- 
ants around here," he cried out. "This pony is a 
hunter and a setter. This is his way of warning 
me." And, sure enough, when the men dismounted 
and went to the bushes they did scare up the birds 
and were able to shoot them. The man was very 
much impressed and finally made a trade. 

They changed their saddles and went on. Soon 
they reached a stream which they had to ford. The 
new owner of the pony applied his spur as they went 
into the stream, when out went the pony's forefoot 
and down he lay. The former owner cried out, 
"Don't be discouraged. He is just as good for fish 
as he is for fowl." "And that's the way with Doug- 
las," he would say, "he is as good for the South as 
he is for the North." 

One feature of the fight which Lincoln's boy 
friends particularly resented was Douglas' trickery 
in debate. He was a poor Scout when it came to 



The Fight of His Life 139 

meeting the hard blows Lincoln gave him. He be- 
gan by trying to belittle Mr. Lincoln. "He's a kind, 
amiable, intelligent gentleman," he said. He'd first 
known him twenty-five years ago; they'd been to- 
gether in the legislature for a term, and then Mr. 
Lincoln had "subsided," been "submerged." Ten, 
years later, when he was in the United States Sen- 
ate Lincoln had turned up in Congress for a term, 
but the people had refused to return him and now 
here he was, disputing an election with him. Of 
course Douglas did not say, "Isn't that the most 
impudent and absurd thing you ever heard of?" but 
that was what his hearers knew he wanted them to 
feel, and his followers took the cue and set out to 
make Mr. Lincoln in every way ridiculous. 

The chief Douglas paper. The Times of Chicago, 
followed its leader by making a hodgepodge of all 
that Mr. Lincoln said. They made his sentences 
ungrammatical, ran them together, left out punc- 
tuation or misplaced it, twisted his meaning, so that 
the result was often an unreadable conglomeration 
of nonsense. And when The Press and Tribune, a 
Lincoln paper, published his speeches properly and 
charged The Times with mangling its reports, the 
Douglas paper came back, declaring that they were 
exact, but that the Republicans, realizing how badly 
Mr. Lincoln was doing, had sent out some one to 
"rake after" him. That this was not true, we know 
from the same Horace White whose description of 
Mr. Lincoln in 1854 I have already given you. Mr. 
White was at the time on The Press and Tribune, 
and it was his business to go over the shorthand re- 



I40 Boy Scouts* Life of Lincoln 

ports made of all the speeches and he declares he 
never made any change, 

Mr. Lincoln was always good-natured under these 
repeated efforts to make him out an insignificant 
person. "Of course what Mr. Douglas says is 
true," he replied. "With me, the race of ambition 
has been a failure — a flat failure; with him, it has 
been a splendid success. Senator Douglas is of 
world renown. All of the anxious politicians of his 
party, or who have been of his party for years past, 
have been looking upon him as certain, at no distant 
date, to be the President of the United States. They 
have seen in his jolly, fruitful face post offices, land 
offices, marshalships, and Cabinet appointments, 
chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and 
sprouting forth in wonderful exuberance, ready to 
be laid hold of by their greedy hands. On the con- 
trary, nobody has ever expected me to be President. 
In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen 
that any cabbages were sprouting out." 

Nor did this kind of attack dishearten him. He 
believed too profoundly in the truth and soundness 
of his arguments, "I know the judge is a great man, 
while I am only a small man, but / feel that I have 
got him." 

Nor was this effort to make fun of Mr. Lincoln 
Douglas' most serious offense against the code of 
fair play in debate. When he knew Lincoln did 
have him — was making an argument or a charge that 
he could not answer or stating facts that he could 
not disprove — he actually roared with rage and 
called it all a lie. Lincoln took it good-naturedly. 



The Fight of His Life 141 

"It is no use," he said, "for Judge Douglas to 'swell 
himself up,' take on dignity, call people liars. If 
you have ever studied geometry, you remember that, 
by a course of reasoning, Euclid proves that all the 
angles in a triangle are equal to two right angles. 
Euclid has shown you how to work it out. Now if 
you undertake to disprove that proposition and show 
that it is erroneous, would you prove it to be false by 
calling Euclid a liar?" 

What really irritated Mr. Lincoln was being 
forced constantly to give time to answering charges 
that did not bear on the great theme. For instance, 
Douglas again and again charged that he had re- 
fused to support the Government by voting sup- 
plies for the Mexican War. This was not true. Lin- 
coln had always voted supplies. Finally, at one of 
the debates where Douglas was taking up time re- 
peating this, Lincoln settled it by seizing by the col- 
lar a friend of Douglas, a man who had been in 
Congress at the same time that he was, and dragging 
him to the platform, "Here, you were there, and you 
know whether I voted supplies or not. Is Judge 
Douglas telling the truth?" The man so unexpect- 
edly dragged in front of the audience had to admit 
that Douglas was lying, 

"Judge Douglas," he complained one day, "is 
playing cuttlefish — a small species of fish that has 
no mode of defending himself when pursued except 
by throwing out a black fluid which makes the water 
so dark the enemy cannot see it, and thus it escapes." 

The way the two men fought became more and 
more interesting, especially to boys and young men. 



142 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

A boy wants fair play. He doesn't like to see the 
man he is backing play tricks, if he is an honest boy. 
The anger and bitterness and unfairness of Douglas 
in the struggle lost him much sympathy even among 
his followers; and the good nature, kindliness, and 
fairness of Lincoln softened even his enemies. That 
is, Douglas lost sympathy as Lincoln gained it. His 
sincerity, his scrupulous care to state things as they 
were, to correct or explain an error if one was 
pointed out, his frankness in meeting every point 
that Douglas made, never evading or skulking, piled 
up the respect of friend and foe. His deep earnest- 
ness, his appeal to the right and wrong of the mat- 
ter took deepest hold, especially of the young. 
Many a boy felt his heart burning with a desire to 
spend his life fighting for the right thing, the honest 
thing, as he watched Abraham Lincoln making his 
great fight. It was this that made Illinois, as a 
whole, feel as the debates came to a close that the 
honors were fairly Lincoln's. Every one, friend 
and foe, agreed that he had been what a man should 
always be — honest, brave, and courteous. 

The debates closed the middle of October, and 
in November came the elections. Lincoln had 
nearly four thousand more votes in the State than 
Douglas, but a senator is elected by the legislature; 
and the Democrats came out with forty seats to the 
Republicans' thirty-five; that is, Douglas had won 
the senatorship. 

Of course Lincoln was disappointed; but his 
friends wondered that he did not seem downhearted. 
He laughed and said that even if he had stubbed his 



The Fight of His Life 143 

toe, he was too big to cry. The truth was, however, 
that he did not think himself defeated. He had set 
out to do something which he considered more im- 
portant to his party and to the country than being 
himself elected. He had set out to prove that Doug- 
las was carrying water on both shoulders — trying 
to make Illinois think he meant one thing and the 
South another. He felt he had done that, for he 
knew the South would never accept the explanation 
by which Douglas had won Illinois. This meant 
that Douglas never would be President. 

He was satisfied that he had persuaded great 
numbers of people that unless slavery was stopped, 
as the Fathers had expected it to be, it would spread 
all over the country. At the same time, he knew he 
had made these same thousands of men, women, and 
boys feel that this never must be, because slavery 
was wrong. 

As for himself, "Well," he said, "although I now 
sink out of view and shall be forgotten, I believe I 
have made some marks which will tell for the cause 
of civil liberty long after I am gone." And that 
had been his great aim — not merely to be senator. 
You see, he really thought he had won. 

And so he went cheerfully back to his law. And 
high time, too. For months he had been earning 
nothing and the time had come when he had not even 
money for houshould expenses. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE BIG GIANT OF ILLINOIS 

He went about his work — such work as few 
Ever had laid on head and heart and hand — 

As one who knows, where there's a task to do, 

Man's honest will must Heaven's good grace command. 

Tom Taylor. 

"V^TEXT to winning a fight Is giving the winner a 
I ^ drubbing that sets the knowing who look on 
to saying, "Watch that man. He has the 
makings of a champion." 

That Is what happened in the Lincoln-Douglas 
fight of 1858. Douglas won; that is, he was elected 
senator; but Lincoln put up a fight that set scores of 
young men and some older ones In Illinois declaring 
that he was a "great man;" a greater man than 
Douglas;" "the greatest man who ever lived" one 
young editor shouted, forthwith rushing to his paper 
and proposing him for the next President of the 
United States ! 

Their enthusiasm was strengthened by evidence 
that came to them of the Impression Lincoln's work 
had made outside of the State — even on "great men" 
— leaders in the life of the East. What was the joy 
of one of this young group when he received a let- 
ter from an important Easterner, asking: "Who is 
144 



The Big Giant of Illinois I45 

this man that is replying to Douglas in your State? 
Do you realize that no greater speeches have been 
made on public questions in the history of our 
country?" 

"There," they all cried as the letter was passed 
around, "I told you so." 

One Lincoln man in the East, when the struggle 
was going on, came back to tell how amazed and 
delighted he had been to find that whenever it was 
known he was from Illinois, all sorts of questions 
about Lincoln were asked him : How old he was, 
where he had been educated, what he "did." Was 
he rich? How did he know so much? 

This friend boasted loudly, "We have two giants 
v.L Illinois. Douglas is our little Giant — but our Big 
Giant is Abraham Lincoln." 

"This interest should be kept alive," he told Mr. 
Lincoln. "It will make you president," and he sug- 
gested that a sketch or "life" be published. Lincoln 
only shook his head. "What's the use of talking of 
me for the presidency, while we have such men as 
Seward, Chase, and others, who are so much better 
known to the people, and whose names are so inti- 
mately associated with the principles of the Repub- 
lican party? Everbody knows them; nobody scarcely 
outside of Illinois knows me. Besides, is it not, as 
a matter of justice, due to such men, who have car- 
ried this movement forward to its present status, in 
spite of fearful opposition, personal abuse, and hard 
names? I really think so. 

"Let's don't talk about it, it won't pay." 

His hesitation did not discourage his friends. He 



146 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

had the makings of a champion. They would back 
him. One of them — the young editor who had lost 
his head at the convention in 1856 when Lincoln 
had made the speech which had carried everybody 
away with enthusiasm — went to Washington about 
a year after the debates and began to talk up Lincoln 
to members of Congress. 

He was an available man, he told them; that is, 
he was a man they could all get together on — which 
was not true in the case of other better-known candi- 
dates. What this young editor was really trying to 
do was to make people in various parts of the coun- 
try know that Lincoln was in the field and that Illi- 
nois was behind him. 

In the meantime, Lincoln was building himself 
up politically better than he realized. If he didn't 
see much chance for himself he saw a great future 
for the Republican party if they were "united and 
resolute." They must keep their pile of votes to- 
gether. They must not waste time dallying with 
Douglas as some of the Easterners were still in- 
clined to do. They must stand solid for i860. He 
found many chances to do his part in keeping the 
ranks in line. From all sides there came calls for 
him to help the Republicans. It was such a call that 
in the fall of 1859 took him to Ohio. He went will- 
ingly, for he was again on Douglas' heels. And 
again he believed he "had" him. The Little Giant 
had given him a fine opening by declaring that the 
men who had founded the country, the "Fathers" — 
believed with him that Congress had no power to 
keep slavery out of the territories — that it was purely 



The Big Giant of Illinois I47 

a local matter. Lincoln was terribly indignant over 
this contention. 

"There are two ways of establishing a proposi- 
tion," he said in Ohio. "One is by trying to demon- 
strate it upon reason, and the other is to show that 
great men in former times have thought so and so, 
and thus to pass it by the weight of pure authority. 
Now, if Judge Douglas will demonstrate somehow 
that this is popular sovereignty — the right of one 
man to make a slave of another, without any right in 
that other or any one else to object — demonstrate it 
as Euclid demonstrated propositions — there is no ob- 
jection. But when he comes forward, seeking to 
carry a principle by bringing it to the authority of 
men who themselves utterly repudiate that principle, 
I ask that he shall not be permitted to do it. He 
asks the community to believe that the men of the 
Revolution were in favor of his great principle, when 
we have the naked history that they themselves 
dealt with this very subject matter of his principle, 
and utterly repudiated his principle, acting upon a 
precisely contrary ground. It is as impudent and 
absurd as if a prosecuting attorney should stand up 
before a jury and ask them to convict A as the mur- 
derer of B, while B was walking alive before them." 

Lincoln realized, however, that he did not neces- 
sarily rout Douglas by insisting that he was wrong. 
He must prove it, and so when late in the year he 
received an invitation from the Young Men's Repub- 
lican Club of Brooklyn, New York, to speak in 
Plymouth Church the next February, he set to work 
to collect full proofs. It was a heavy task, but he 



148 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

did not shirk it. All through the winter he pored 
over records and documents and histories of the 
period when the Constitution was being made and 
amended, refreshing his memory, digging up new 
facts, examining and strengthening the arguments 
he had been building up in the last six years and out 
of it all producing a new speech which he knew was 
a good one — good because it was sound at the heart 
— the truth and the whole truth about the "Fathers." 

When the time for his engagement came, the 
speech was finished and carefully written out. Anx- 
ious to look his best as well as to do his best, he 
bought a brand-new suit of clothes and started East. 
When he arrived he found that the club had trans- 
ferred the lecture to New York City, such was the 
interest in his coming. He was to speak in Cooper 
Union and to have in his audience a big group of 
distinguished men — men like Horace Greeley, 
George William Curtis, William CuUen Bryant. It 
was to be a trial of his ability, he saw, a test of what 
he was worth. He set his teeth hard. He knew 
he had his proofs — if he could only present them so 
as to show people their real meaning and stir them 
to action 1 

He had written the speech in full, but he had gone 
over his arguments so carefully and so often in his 
mind that he had no need of notes. Nor did he make 
any attempt to catch his audience at the start by the 
stories and jokes for which he was famous and which 
they rather expected from him, but plunged at once 
into the heart of the question, taking as his text 
words from Douglas' own mouth : 







Lincoln in February, i860, at the Time of the Cooper 
Institute Speech 

From photograph by P.rady. It was a frequc-nt remark of T.incl,. that 
this portrait and the Cooper Institute Speech made him 1 resident. 



The Big Giant of Illinois 149 

"Our Fathers, when they framed the government 
under which we live, understood this question just 
as well, and even better than we do now." 

"I agree," said Mr. Lincoln, "now let us see how 
they understood it." Who were the "Fathers?" 
First, there were the thirty-nine men who signed the 
Constitution. What did they think about letting 
slavery into the territories? Man by man he had 
picked them out and hunted up just what they had 
said and how they had voted on the subject. He 
showed his audience that twenty-one of the thirty- 
nine were on record as against slavery in any terri- 
tory the United States then owned — only two he 
found had ever voted for its admission. He in- 
cluded the members of the first Congress in the 
"Fathers" as they had adopted the first ten amend- 
ments made to the Constitution and he showed that 
this congress of seventy-six men passed an ordinance 
forbidding slavery in all the territory we then owned. 

Of course we should count George Washington 
as a "Father." What did he think about Congress 
having the power to keep slavery out of the terri- 
tory? Why, he signed the bill that did the thing. 
Moreover, he told Lafayette he thought It a wise 
thing to do and that for his part he hoped the time 
would come when all the States would be free. 

That is, Lincoln had taken Douglas at his word 
and showed by proof, which had cost him long days 
of research, that the "Fathers" had thought slavery 
ought to be restricted, that they had made the best 
laws they could to restrict it ; and had stood by these 
laws as long as they lived. 



150 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

All that the Republicans now asked, Mr. Lincoln 
said, was that Congress continue to do as the 
"Fathers" had done. "As those Fathers marked it, 
so let it be again marked as an evil not to be ex- 
tended but to be tolerated and protected only be- 
cause of and so far as its actual presence among us 
makes that toleration and protection a necessity." 

Resting on the historical foundation that he had 
laid, Lincoln went on in his speech to claim that the 
Republicans, far from being revolutionists as Doug- 
las was declaring them to be, were in fact the real 
conservatives; that, they were following the Consti- 
tution, not evading it. If this were true, why should 
there be men threatening to leave the Union in case 
a Republican President was elected? What would 
satisfy people that were making these threats? 
Nothing in the world, Lincoln said, but that the 
Republicans should declare that slavery was right 
and allow it to spread, and he ended his speech with 
certain sentences, necessary to bear in mind if you 
are to fully understand just how Lincoln was think- 
ing and feeling at this moment. 

"If slavery is right," he said, "all words, acts, 
laws, and constitutions against it are themselves 
wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If 
it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality — 
its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly in- 
sist upon its extension — its enlargement. All they 
ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery 
right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they 
thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our 



The Big Giant of Illinois 151 

thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which de- 
pends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as 
they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full 
recognition as being right; but thinking it wrong, as 
we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes 
with their view, and against our own? In view of 
our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can 
we do this? 

"Wrong, as we think slavery is, we can yet afford 
to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to 
the necessity arising from its actual presence in the 
nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, 
allow it to spread Into the national territories, and 
to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense 
of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty 
fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none 
of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so 
industriously plied and belabored — contrivances such 
as groping for some middle ground between the right 
and the wrong; vain as the search for a man who 
should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such 
as a policy of 'don't care' on a question about which 
all true men do care; such as Union appeals beseech- 
ing true Union men to yield to Disunionists, revers- 
ing the divine rule and calling, not the sinners, but 
the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to 
Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washing- 
ton said and undo what Washington did. 

"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by 
false accusations against us, nor frightened from it 
by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of 



152 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right 
makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare 
to do our duty as we understand it." 

Mr. Lincoln's highly intelligent audience was so 
captivated by the careful and solid way in which he 
built up his arguments and by the force and origi- 
nality of his expressions that again and again the 
packed house stopped him by long and enthusiastic 
applause. He won them completely. The next day 
The New York Evening Post, of which the poet, 
William Cullen Bryant, was editor, published the 
whole speech, and a committee of the Young Men's 
Republican Club, eager to let people see what this 
Western man, who had so carried away an Eastern 
audience, looked like, took him out and had his 
photograph made. A few days later this picture 
filled the front page of Harper's JFeekly. 

Mr. Lincoln used to say that the Cooper Union 
speech and this picture made him President. You 
should study the picture as well as the speech. And 
if you do, you will see at once that he was not the 
uncouth, ill-clad man that his enemies were already 
describing him to be. This picture shows a man of 
dignity and gentleness, with a face of strong lines 
and features and eyes deep with feeling. And as for 
clothes, they were the correct ones of the day, easily 
and unconsciously worn. A man to look at again 
and again if you met him in a crowd. 

You can imagine how all that had happened in 
New York delighted his friends back home who were 
working so hard to make him Illinois' candidate for 
President. There were not a few of the most impor- 



The Big Giant of Illinois I53 

tant Republicans In the State who felt as Lincoln 
had felt himself that with Seward and Chase in the 
field it would be wasting ammunition to use Lincoln. 
Seward had the lead, and it was this lead that Lin- 
coln's friends were trying to overcome. They, of 
course, made the best of what he had done in New 
York. "Look at this," they shouted, "his whole 
speech reported in a big New York paper, and a 
full-page picture in Harper's Weekly. They recog- 
nize what we have always said, that Lincoln is a 
great man. And if this is so, why should we not 
stand by our own? Why go outside of the State for 
a candidate when we have such material?" 

When Lincoln came back after a month of speak- 
ing and sight-seeing in the East he found his presi- 
dential boom had grown like a gourd in his absence, 
and it looked every day more and more as if he and 
not Seward would be the choice of the State when 
the convention was held. And so it happened. He 
was nominated at Decatur, the town near which his 
father had settled in 1831. 

Whatever opposition there was to him when the 
convention met was swept away by a simple demon- 
stration, suggested by the very man with whom in 
those early days he had cut rails and steered flat- 
boats. This was John Hanks, who, you will remem- 
ber, Thomas Lincoln had decided to follow into Illi- 
nois. Hanks was still living on his farm near Deca- 
tur, and although he was a Democrat, his admiration 
for Lincoln was so great that when he heard that his 
name was before the convention, he went into town 
and looked up a delegate whom he knew. "I have 



154 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

known Mr. Lincoln for thirty years," he told this 
man, "and we are opposed in politics. I have seen 
him defeated again and again, when he knew that all 
he had to do to win was to change, but he has never 
changed. I respect him and I want you to help me 
to do something for him." 

Hanks went on to tell this man how, in their boy- 
hood days, he and Lincoln had toiled together, some- 
times flatboating, sometimes lumbering; how they 
had tramped the prairies and forests with gun and 
ax, cut and mauled rails along the Sangamon River, 
to enclose his father's little home. All this time, 
however hard he was working, there never was a 
time but what he managed somehow to get books. 
He settled all the disputes in the neighborhood, and 
his decisions were always abided by. "I never knew 
a man so honest, under all circumstances, for his 
whole life," declared John Hanks. "My wife used 
to say to me that some day Abe would come out and 
be something, but I could not exactly see how a day 
laborer, hopelessly poor, would ever stand much 
chance to get up high in the world. So when I heard 
that they were going to run him for President here 
at Decatur, I thought that it might be a good thing 
to present some of the rails that we made together 
thirty years ago. I thought they would speak louder 
in his praise than any orator could and that the con- 
vention would like to honor true labor." 

The friend to whom John Hanks said all of this, 
and probably a good deal more, quite agreed; and 
as a result of their talk, just before the vote on the 
candidate was taken, a little procession marched into 



The Big Giant of Illinois 155 

the room, bearing a big banner mounted on fence 
rails. On this banner was this inscription: 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

The Rail Candidate 
FOR PRESIDENT IN i860 

Two rails from a lot of 3,000 made in 
1830 by John Hanks and Abe Lincoln — 
whose father was the first pioneer of 
Macon County. 

The whole convention broke out in cheers and 
began to call "Lincoln, Lincoln." "I suppose," said 
Mr. Lincoln, rising and pointing to the banner, "that 
I am expected to reply to that. I can't say that I 
made those rails or not, but I am quite sure that I 
made a great many just as good." The heart of the 
convention warmed toward him — a great man — the 
"Big Giant" of Illinois; a man who knew — nobody 
better — what hard labor meant. A wise man in the 
crowd, listening to the cheers, turned to a friend and 
said, "Seward has lost the Illinois delegation." And 
so he had. 

Lincoln was Illinois' choice, her "favorite son." 
But how about the country? Could he get even one 
more State? Why should he get another State, Lin- 
coln still asked himself, when there were men like 
Seward and Chase? 

The friends who had engineered his boom to this 
point did not stop to ask this question. They were 
too busy. 



1^6 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

The national Republican convention of 1861 was 
held in Chicago, and this gave them a great advan- 
tage — the advantage a home team always has on its 
own field over a visiting team. There are more 
banners flying for it, more girls wearing its colors, 
bigger crowds cheering its moves. The Lincoln dele- 
gation did not neglect a single point. They flung 
banners across every street in Chicago, draped the 
face of every friendly building. They brought in 
crowds from all over the prairies, with every State 
band they could lay their hands upon, to march and 
sing and hurrah. 

Other States might import famous bands and ora- 
tors and banners; but Illinois saw to it that her man 
had more of everything. 

When a political party chooses a candidate for 
President, the chief thing is to find a man who can 
be elected. The business of Lincoln's friends in this 
convention was to persuade a majority of the dele- 
gates that he had a better chance of being elected 
than any other man, even Seward himself. Seward 
was the leader of the party, no doubt, but there were 
great States like Illinois, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and 
New Jersey in which the prejudices against him were 
so strong that they could not elect him. Why go 
down to defeat with Seward, the Illinois men argued, 
when there was no such prejudice against Lincoln? 

But the delegates from other States could argue 
the same about their favorite sons, and did. The 
Illinois delegates then had the task of persuading 
each of these different States that in case its candidate 
could not win, the next best man was Lincoln. 



The Big Giant of Illinois I57 

Still another task that they had was trying to con- 
centrate on Lincoln at once as many as possible of 
the delegates who had come "uninstructed." 

Men always work fiercely at national conventions, 
but probably no delegates ever worked harder than 
these friends of Abraham Lincoln in i860. For 
days before the convention and night and day after 
it began, they ran from one State group to another, 
arguing, pleading, threatening, trading. And their 
work told, for, even before the convention was called 
on May i6th, Lincoln's chances were looking up. All 
through the early days of the convention these 
chances constantly improved; still, on the morning of 
the day the nomination was to be made, there seemed 
to be no great likelihood of his succeeding. The 
best observers were saying that Seward's nomination 
was sure. 

A great convention for nominating a President is 
always one of the most exciting things that happens 
in this country, and the crowds it draws together are 
among the largest that we ever see. In Chicago in 
i860 the Republicans had an enormous gathering. 
They had built a great barn of an auditorium which 
they called the Wigwam — big enough to hold some 
ten thousand people. This was packed to the very 
roof the morning the voting began while outside the 
streets were packed quite as closely with people wait- 
ing for news. If you have ever been at a convention 
you know how, after the names of all the candidates 
are in, and the voting begins, you hold your very 
breath. You know how quickly your pencil flies as 
you put down the votes for each man, how swiftly 



158 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

you add them up, how quickly you compare the re- 
sults ! That morning in Chicago, hundreds of pen- 
cils, held by hands, many of which trembled with ex- 
citement, cast up votes; and the very first addition 
told a tale. Lincoln had 102 votes — 5 1 3^ more than 
the next man below him. It was a big difference. 

Could these 5 1 j^ votes be secured for him ? They 
belonged to Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania knew that 
she had no chance of winning for her man, Simon 
Cameron. Might she not be impressed by the size 
of Lincoln's vote and change at once for him? There 
was a quick consultation; the answer came: "Penn- 
sylvania gives her 52 votes for Lincoln." It was the 
beginning of a break. Others quickly followed, and 
when the flying pencils added up the second ballot, 
Lincoln had 182 votes. The third ballot was taken 
quickly, and ten thousand people sat breathless as 
State after State turned over its vote to Lincoln. 
This last report was scarcely in before a whisper 
and then a yell ran through the great crowd — 231^ 
votes for Lincoln; 2^ more would give him the 
nomination. Ohio was the first to act — 4 votes from 
Chase. He had won. 

You know, of course, what happened then. You 
can imagine the roar that rose and fell until there was 
no breath left in the cheerers. Illinois that morning 
had packed the Wigwam with men and women pre- 
pared, in case of Lincoln's nomination, to outroar 
anything that had ever been known in the history of 
political conventions. One of Lincoln's friends who 
had worked longest and hardest for him has left a 



The Big Giant of Illinois 159 

stirring description of what this claque did when 
the vote was announced. 

"The scene which followed baffles all human de- 
scription. After an instant's silence, as deep as 
death, which seemed to be required to enable the 
assembly to take in the full force of the announce- 
ment, the wildest and mightiest yell (for it can be 
called by no other name) burst forth from ten thou- 
sand voices which we ever heard from mortal 
throats. This strange and tremendous demonstra- 
tion, accompanied with leaping up and down, tossing 
hats, handkerchiefs, and canes recklessly into the air, 
with the waving of flags, and with every other con- 
ceivable mode of exultant and unbridled joy, con- 
tinued steadily and without pause for perhaps ten 
minutes. 

"It then began to rise and fall in slow and billow- 
ing bursts, and for perhaps the next five minutes 
these stupendous waves of uncontrollable excitement, 
now rising into the deepest and fiercest shouts and 
then sinking like the ground swell of the ocean into 
hoarse and lessening murmurs, rolled through the 
multitude. Every now and then it would seem as 
though the physical power of the assembly was ex- 
hausted and that quiet would be restored, when all 
at once a new hurricane would break out, more pro- 
longed and terrific than anything before. If sheer 
exhaustion had not prevented, we don't know but the 
applause would have continued to this hour." 

While this was going on inside the Wigwam, the 
town outside went crazy. A boy with a cannon had 



l6o Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

been placed on the roof with instructions to fire if 
Lincoln was nominated. When this cannon boomed 
the news, twenty thousand people in the neighbor- 
hood took up the cry. It spread over the city, and 
from the city to the country; and before morning it 
was just as Douglas said when he heard the news in 
Washington, "There won't be a tar barrel left in 
Illinois to-night." 

Down in Springfield the town had been hanging 
around the telegraph ofiice all the morning, waiting 
for news. Mr. Lincoln himself had dropped in two 
or three times only to go out when the report came 
in that the voting had begun. He still did not think 
it was possible that he could win over Seward. He 
was standing in the door of a shop across the square, 
talking to a friend, when he suddenly saw a boy 
plunging headlong through the crowd toward him. 
He was shouting at the top of his voice: "Mr. 
Lincoln, you are nominated ! Mr. Lincoln, you are 
nominated!" 

You can imagine what happened in Springfield 
then — the handshaking and the laughing and the 
crying! How the men gathered about Mr. Lincoln 
and the woman ran in to talk it over with Mrs. 
Lincoln! How the boys and the girls gathered 
around Tad and Willie — the two Lincoln boys who 
were at home ! 

It was the beginning of an exciting nine months 
for Springfield — a nine months in which almost every 
day brought some new joyful or tragic sensation. 

If Mr. Lincoln had had doubts of his nomina- 
tion up to the very hour that the excited small boy 



The Big Giant of Illinois i6l 

rushed across the square shouting the news, he had 
less of his election. If the Republicans held to- 
gether, it looked as if it could be done — and this was 
true chiefly because those who opposed him were 
badly divided. There was a party that believed 
slavery could not legally be kept off new soil by either 
Congress or local government, and it had a ticket 
in the field. There was a party which declared Con- 
gress could not keep it out but that the local govern- 
ment could; or, as Mr, Lincoln put it: "A thing 
may be lawfully driven away from where it has a 
lawful right to be;" and it had a ticket and Douglas 
was at its head. There was a third party which 
evaded the slavery question and declared for the 
Union, and it had a ticket. A situation more helpful 
to Mr. Lincoln's success could not have been ar- 
ranged, if the Republicans only held together. But 
would they? Would great men like Seward and 
Chase consent? To Mr. Lincoln's great joy they did 
soon consent, and, disappointed as they were, wrote 
him manly letters of congratulation. Seward's fol- 
lowers were all for bolting the nomination at first 
and putting Mr. Seward in the field. He laughed at 
them. "The Republican party was not made for 
William H. Seward," he said, "but Mr. Seward, if 
he is worth anything, for the Republican party." 

It was not long before everybody was in line. If 
they worked they could do it, they kept telling one 
another. 

It was a great campaign, that followed; and it 
was a campaign in which more boys took part than 
any that the country had ever seen. The feature in 



1 62 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

which they were most interested was the "Wide 
Awakes." There were bands organized for street 
parades, bodyguards for political speakers, and for 
all sorts of campaign work, such work as Boy Scouts 
would do nowadays. They wore black-glazed caps 
and capes and carried blazing coal-oil torches. The 
ambition of each club of Wide Awakes was to outdo 
all neighboring clubs in fantastic marching. They 
learned all the movements they could hear of and 
invented their own combinations, drilling until they 
were perfect in their forming and reforming. Their 
favorite march was the zigzag — an imitation of a 
rail fence. Each band, of course, had its own partic- 
ular badge, and each was ambitious to have on its 
badge a picture of Mr. Lincoln splitting rails or 
steering a flatboat. 

Many of the Wide Awakes carried their banners 
mounted on rails in the fashion introduced at the 
Decatur convention, and proud indeed was the club 
that had one of the original rails Lincoln had made 
in 1 83 1. None of the Wide Awakes owned a Lin- 
coln relic quite so precious, however, as the band at 
Hartford, Connecticut — this was the very maul with 
which he had split the rails which were now in such 
demand. This maul was treasured by the Hartford 
Wide Awakes as long as they existed and finally was 
given to the Connecticut Historical Society, where it 
is still to be seen. 

The Wide Awakes marched and everybody sang. 
The refrain of the favorite song ran: 

"Oh, ain't you glad you joined the Republicans?" 



The Big Giant of Illinois 163 

But the finest was Whittier's " The Quakers are 
Out." 

"Give the flags to the winds! 

Set the hills all aflame! 
Make way for the man with 

The Patriarch's name! 
Away with misgivings — away 

With all doubt, 
For Lincoln goes in when the 

Quakers are out!" 



Marching and singing were only the accompani- 
ments to the speaking. The campaign was distin- 
guished by some of the noblest and most sincere 
political speeches we've ever heard in the United 
States. The theme was so great — that of human 
freedom — that it brought out the best in men. 
Charles Sumner, William H. Seward, Carl Schurz, 
Horace Greeley, Salmon P. Chase were the most 
noted of these speakers; but there was scarcely a 
county in the North that did not have its local ora- 
tor. Through the summer and fall there was a con- 
tinual succession of rallies and celebrations and polit- 
ical picnics bringing together thousands of people. 
The greatest of these all was in Springfield in August, 
when a procession of seventy-five thousand people — 
eight miles long — passed before Mr. Lincoln's door. 
Think of what that meant to the boys of the town 
that knew and loved him so well! 

The hard work the Republicans were putting in, 
the enthusiasm that their feeling that they were right 
was giving them, the division in their opponents' 
lines, told every day; and long before election time 



164 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

Mr. Lincoln felt reasonably sure that he would be 
the next President of the United States. But, along 
with this certainty, came an increasing anxiety. Ever 
since the Republicans had set out to prevent slavery's 
spreading to free soil, there had been many groups 
of important people in the slave States, who had 
threatened to go out of the Union and fight to stay 
out, if the Republicans should ever elect a President. 
They had said this in 1856, and when Mr. Lincoln 
went over to the new party that year and made his 
great "lost speech," he had told them that, such 
questions were to be settled in this country "by bal- 
lots, not bullets." And he had added, "We won't 
go out of the Union, and you shan't." 

The more flourishing the Republicans became, the 
louder the threats of the Disunionists. When Mr. 
Lincoln spoke in Cincinnati in the fall of 1859, he 
had a good many of the discontented in his audience, 
and he took pains to reassure them. "Suppose we 
do beat you," he said, "what are we going to do with 
you ? We mean to treat you as nearly as we possibly 
can as Washington and Jefferson and Madison 
treated you. We mean to leave you alone, and in 
no way interfere with your institution, to abide by 
all and every compromise of the Constitution. We 
mean to remember that you are as good as we, that 
there is no difference between us other than the dif- 
ference of circumstances. We mean to recognize 
and bear in mind always that you have as good hearts 
in your bosoms as other people or as we claim to 
have, and treat you accordingly. We mean to marry 



The Big Giant of Illinois 165 

your girls when we have a chance — the white ones, 
I mean; and I have the honor to inform you that I 
once did have a chance in that way." 

As the election approached and it looked more and 
more as if the Republicans would succeed, the Dis- 
unionists became louder and louder in their threats. 
Mr. Lincoln, however, never really believed that 
they would carry out what they said. It did not 
seem possible to him. To him the Union was one 
and indivisible, something sacred, that must be pro- 
tected and preserved. He felt that it was not only 
the liberty and happiness of the people of this coun- 
try that was involved in the preservation of the 
Union, but the hope of the world for all future time. 
We were trying to work out a government based on 
the Declaration of Independence — a government 
which promised that in due time the weights should 
be lifted from the shoulders of all men and that all 
should have an equal chance. For men deliberately 
to attempt to break up a Union which had this senti- 
ment behind it was unthinkable to him. He did not 
believe it of the South, and although the defiance 
became thicker and thicker through the summer and 
fall, he held to this opinion. And in this he was 
backed by Seward and Schurz and Bryant — all of 
whom laughed at the alarms. Not a few people in 
the South — for in every State there were groups of 
Unionists — kept writing him, not to be frightened, 
that although there might be disorder if he were 
elected, there certainly would not be secession. 
But suppose they should try it? He had to ask 



l66 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

himself that. And did. Well, there was no doubt at 
all in his mind about what his duty would be — he 
must preserve the Union. 

You see, then, that even before his election, his 
problem had begun to change, that instead of its 
being a fight to keep slavery back where it legally 
belonged, it looked as if it might become a fight to 
keep the Union together. 

In November, the hopes of the Republicans were 
realized — Mr. Lincoln was elected. No sooner was 
this done, however, than he saw how mistaken he had 
been in his confidence that the Disunionists would not 
carry out their threats. Seven States, one after the 
other, quickly left the Union, and as they left they 
prepared to defend themselves, seizing United States 
forts and arsenals within their reach and voting 
large sums for arms. Early in February of 1861, 
these states united in a new government, the South- 
ern Confederacy adopted a constitution, elected of- 
ficers, and went about creating an army and navy. In 
doing this they were quite as sure that they were 
right as Mr. Lincoln was sure that they were wrong. 
Just as he believed and said that if the South suc- 
ceeded in extending slavery to free territory they 
would eventually extend it into the free States, so 
the South believed that if Mr. Lincoln and his party 
prevented their extending slavery, they would event- 
ually try to abolish it, even where it had been made 
legal. If we cannot live and do what we think right 
within the Union, they said, we will leave it and 
establish a government where we can follow out our 
own ideas of what is right and what is wrong. This 



The Big Giant of Illinois 167 

meant, of course, that the Disunionists did not share 
Mr. Lincoln's strong devotion to the Union. 

While all this was going on, Mr. Lincoln was 
sitting in Springfield. Not until after his inaugura- 
tion on March 4th would he have the power to lift 
his voice or take a step to interfere with what the 
seceding States were doing. The barn door was 
open, the horse was being stolen before his eyes, and 
he could do nothing. It was even doubtful if, when 
he finally did get to Washington, he could find the 
tracks. Nothing is harder than not to have the 
power to lift your hand when something you love is 
being destroyed. The helpless Republicans were dis- 
tracted. There were some in the party who said, 
"Let them go." There were others who said "Let's 
compromise — give them what they want." And 
there were still others who said with Mr. Lincoln 
in 1856, "We won't go out of the Union, and you 
shan't." That is, the united party that had elected 
Mr. Lincoln was becoming a divided party; and each 
faction was besieging Mr. Lincoln to adopt its way 
of thinking. 

Thousands of letters and hundreds of visitors 
poured into Springfield — begging him to stand by his 
guns, to spike his guns, to deliver his guns to the 
Disunionists. Threats filled his mail — threats of 
hanging, of shooting, of kidnaping. He kept his 
head through it all, and he held his tongue as well, 
going about his preparations for Washington, select- 
ing his Cabinet, writing his inaugural address, closing 
up his law business, though not taking down his 
"shingle." "Let it hang there undisturbed," he told 



1 68 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

his partner. "If I live, I am coming back some time 
and then we will go right on practicing law as if 
nothing had happened." He went out of his way to 
say good-by to all his old friends, and took a day off 
to visit his father's grave in Coles County, and to 
pass a few hours with his beloved stepmother, now 
over seventy years old. The parting with her was 
the saddest of all for, far away in the country, as 
she was, the threats against Mr. Lincoln's life had 
reached her, and she had come to feel that she would 
never see him alive again. 

At last everything was done, and on the evening 
of February ii, 1861, Mr. Lincoln and his family 
and a large party of friends left Springfield for 
Washington. As he stood at the end of his car look- 
ing over the great gathering, he made a little parting 
speech, which is counted by lovers of good English 
one of the most perfect things he ever said. There 
were boys of fourteen in that crowd who were so 
deeply moved by it that they were able to repeat 
it as long as they lived. 

"My friends, no one, not in my situation, can 
appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To 
this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe 
everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a cen- 
tury, and have passed from a young to an old man. 
Here my children have been born and one is buried. 
I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I 
may return, with a task before me greater than that 
which rested upon Washington. Without the assist- 
ance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I 
cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. 



The Big Giant of Illinois 169 

Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain 
with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confi- 
dently hope all will yet be well. To His care com- 
mending you, as I hope in your prayers you will 
commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell." 

Although Mr. Lincoln knew that there were many 
people who thought he would never reach Washing- 
ton alive, and the probability was that there were a 
few people who had sworn that he should never live 
to be inaugurated, he did not allow his danger to in- 
terfere in the least with the program of receptions 
and speech-making that had been laid out for him. 
He made every speech and shook every hand. He 
even remembered at one place to ask from the tail 
end of his car for a little girl who, a few months be- 
fore, had written him a letter, asking if he had any 
little girls and telling him that she thought he would 
look better with whiskers. Mr. Lincoln had an- 
swered her that he regretted the necessity of say- 
ing that he had no daughter, but that he had three 
sons, one seventeen, one nine, and one seven. As 
to the whiskers, he wrote her, "As I have never 
worn any, don't you think that people would call it 
a piece of silly affectation were I to begin wearing 
them now?" Regardless, however, of what people 
might think he had actually begun to grow the whisk- 
ers, and passing through the town where the little girl 
lived, he asked for her. Of course, she was there. 
Who would not be, having received a letter from 
him? And when he called for her she came forward 
with a great bunch of flowers for him, and received 
in return a hearty kiss of thanks. 



170 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

When the program had been carried out in full, 
all the speeches made — the last was at Harrisburg 
on February 2 2d — he heeded the warnings of detec- 
tives and friends that a plot to assassinate him as he 
passed through Baltimore had been discovered, and, 
slipping away from his party, took an earlier train 
than that which he had been announced to take, and 
at daylight on February 23d, was safe in the capital. 

On March 4th came the inauguration. Never was 
an inaugural address listened to with such anxiety. 
What would he say? What would he say about the 
new government that the seceding States had 
formed? What would he say about the forts and 
arsenals that they had seized? Would he say, Go 
in peace ! Or would he hold to his view that the 
Union could not be broken? 

What he did say was not harsh, but it was firm. 
What it amounted to was that, in his judgment, the 
Union was made to last, that no State could vote 
itself out, that in spite of what had been happening 
in the South, he regarded the Union still unbroken, 
and that he should go ahead, administering the laws 
everywhere, holding the forts, collecting custom 
duties, distributing the mails. He should not in- 
vade the seceding States or use force against them. 
Kindly and affectionately he begged the dissatisfied 
not to take in hot haste a step which they would never 
take deliberately, but to "think long and well." 
"Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time," he 
counseled them. At the end, he again assured them 
"the government will not assail you. You can have 
no conflict without being yourself the aggressor." 



The Big Giant of Illinois 171 

But in the next sentence he warned them : "You have 
no oath registered in heaven to destroy the govern- 
ment, while I shall have the most solemn one to 
preserve and protect and defend it." 
A moment later he took that oath. 



CHAPTER VIII 

ARMED WITH A SINGLE PURPOSE 

To front a He in arms and not to yield 
This shows, methinks, God's plan 
And measures of a stalwart man. 

James Russell Lowell. 

IT often happens when a man takes a splendid 
oath — Hke that of Abraham Lincoln on March 
4, 1861, "to preserve, to protect and to defend" 
the Constitution — that he does not see definitely 
what it means in conduct; that is, he has no clear 
idea as to how he is going to make good. Mr. Lin- 
coln, when he took his oath, did see. "My course is 
as plain as a turnpike road," he told one of his 
friends. 

He had mentioned several things in his inaugural 
address that he saw on this "turnpike road." One 
was to hold the forts that belonged to the United 
States. 

Now, as we have seen, the seven States in going 
out of the Union had taken possession not only of 
the forts but of the arsenals, dockyards, custom- 
houses — everything belonging to the United States 
within their borders. Nothing was left excepting 
three forts along the Florida coast, and one in the 
center of Charleston Harbor — Fort Sumter, held by 
172 



Armed with a Single Purpose 173 

a small group of United States soldiers under Major 
Robert Anderson. 

According to Mr. Lincoln's oath, he must hold 
Sumter. Whether he did or not would be a test of 
the kind of a President he would prove to be — one 
who meant what he said, or one who, when he saw 
that what he said carried serious consequences with 
it, would squirm out. 

One of the earliest letters that came to him on his 
first full day as President of the United States was 
from Major Anderson, telling him that he had 
neither the men nor the guns and ammunition to de- 
fend himself; worse still, that his provisions were 
almost gone. He might pull through on dry bread, 
pork, and water for four weeks, but no longer. If 
they were to be relieved. Major Anderson said, it 
would take 20,000 men. 

He was not exaggerating. Fort Sumter was 
nearly encircled by hostile forts and batteries, and 
in January, when President Buchanan had attempted 
to send provisions, the vessel had been fired upon by 
the determined South Carolinians and had retired. 
The harbor was stronger now than in January and 
South Carolina no less determined that the North 
should not reach Fort Sumter with food supplies or 
guns. 

What should be done? There were no 20,000 
men on which Mr. Lincoln could put his hands. The 
regular army at that moment numbered only about 
16,000 men, and most of these were in the West 
where Indian troubles called for constant attention. 
Moreover, nearly one third of their officers had al- 



174 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

ready gone over to the Confederacy. The small 
navy was also scattered in many different waters. 
There were many people in the North who wrote 
Mr. Lincoln that, since he had no force to relieve 
the fort, he had better surrender it. There were 
others who, while they did not quite like to use the 
word "surrender," urged that there be no effort to 
relieve Major Anderson, since it would surely cause 
war. 

A man must carry out his plans with the tools in 
his hands. Mr. Lincoln saw only one thing as pos- 
sible, and that was to send the garrison provisions. 
He would not allow brave men as they had shown 
themselves to go hungry, he said, nor would he give 
up the fort; that would be to admit the justice of the 
Southern cause and go back on his word. Instead 
of weakening he was every day feeling more resolute 
about the matter of disunion. He worked con- 
stantly on the case in his own mind. What he asked 
was whether, when an election had gone against a 
group of citizens in a republic, they had a right to 
break up the country. If this could be done, then 
Mr. Lincoln felt that there was no use trying to 
establish a "government of the people by the same 
people." He asked himself whether there might not 
be a fatal weakness in all republics. "Must a gov- 
ernment of necessity be too strong for the liberties 
of its own people or too weak to maintain its own 
existence?" It is not only governments that have to 
ask themselves this question in this life. It is rare 
indeed when any group of people, young or old, come 
together, that sooner or later they do not find that if 



Armed with a Single Purpose ITS 

they become strong there is danger of their becom- 
ing tyrannical and that if they remain weak there is 
danger of their going out of existence. And this is 
just as true of the individual as it is of a group. If 
you are strong, you must look out or you will be a 
tyrant. If you are weak, you must look out or you 
will be a nobody. 

This was what Mr. Lincoln was going over in his 
own mind at this time. His conclusion was that it 
was so important, not only for the United States but 
for the future of the world, that it be proved that a 
republic can be strong enough not only to resist at- 
tacks from the outside but to settle troubles inside, 
that it was worth risking a war to get the proof. 

No, he would not break his word: he would send 
provisions to Fort Sumter; but at the same time he 
would send word to the governor of South Carolina 
that, in doing this, he would not now put in men, 
arms, nor ammunition; and that, if later he con- 
cluded to do so, he would notify him unless, of 
course, there should be an attack upon the fort. 

The provisions were sent; but before they reached 
the fort it was bombarded. The bombardment be- 
gan on the morning of April 12, 1861. Major An- 
derson and his men held out all that day and the 
next. The night of April 13th, Mr. Lincoln had a 
dream. He was sailing rapidly on a singular and 
indescribable vessel toward a dark and indefinite 
shore. The next morning, the 14th, when news 
came that Sumter had fallen, he connected the fall 
with his dream. He had reached the dark shore. 

Mr. Lincoln had told the seceding States in his 



176 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

inaugural address that they could have no conflict 
without being themselves the aggressors. Clearly 
they were now the aggressors, and there was no more 
question in the mind of the North than there was in 
his mind that since the seceding States were unwilling 
to trust to "time, discussion, and the ballot box" as 
he had advised, the government must take back by 
force the property they had seized and which they 
had proved they meant to hold by force. 

And so he at once issued a call for 75,000 men. 
With that number he and his Cabinet believed that 
they could suppress the rebellion, as they called it. 

But the fall of Sumter and this call for men to 
subdue them was all that was needed in the South to 
unite both Secessionists and Union men. Still more 
serious, the Southern Confederacy was quickly en- 
larged now that the tug had come — four more States 
joining fortunes with the seven that were out when 
the Republicans came in. A third group — the Bor- 
der States — complicated Mr. Lincoln's situation, for 
these States — Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri — 
could not decide between the contestants. They were 
pulled both ways. They would not go out of the 
Union, but they would not fight the South. Mr. Lin- 
coln's problem was not merely putting down a rebel- 
lion. It was a question of overwhelming a hostile 
country; that is, it was war. The 75,000 men he 
had called for were not a drop in the bucket. 

The country itself felt this, and all over the North 
there was hardly a town in which, with the news of 
the fall of Sumter, young and old men did not hasten 
to form companies to offer to the government. Meet- 



Armed with a Single Purpose 177 

ings were called in churches, schools, and courthouses 
and on the village greens, and before the minister or 
schoolmaster or judge or politician who urged the de- 
fense of the Union had time to finish his speech, 
there was a rush of men and boys to put down their 
names. Before many weeks went by the Washington 
government was swamped with the men that flowed 
into the new army. 

One of our greatest difficulties, Mr. Lincoln told 
Congress on July 4, 1861, when he called them to- 
gether to report what he had done and to ask for 
money to carry on the war, has been to avoid receiv- 
ing troops faster than we could take care of them. 
"The people will save their government," he said, 
"if the government itself will do its part only indif- 
ferently well." 

It was not only men that were rushed to Wash- 
ington, but it was offers of funds from States and 
from individuals. All the inventors of the country 
set themselves to work to improve weapons and 
boats. All the people who knew anything about 
military science rushed in to offer themselves as 
instructors. The doctors came to build up hospitals, 
and women came to offer themselves as nurses. 

In this instant answer to the guns that destroyed 
Sumter, the action of no one man was more hearten- 
ing to Mr. Lincoln than that of his antagonist in his 
famous fight against the extension of slavery to free 
soil — Stephen Douglas. Mr. Douglas had been de- 
feated for the presidency when Mr. Lincoln was 
elected. He was a senator at that time and in a 
position to know better than Mr. Lincoln did just 



1 78 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

how resolute the South was in its threat to break 
up the Union. This was something he would not 
listen to. He was afraid Mr. Lincoln would weaken 
— not carry out his promise to hold the forts, and 
when finally he did and Sumter was fired on, Mr. 
Douglas went to him, offering him all his great in- 
fluence to back him. He wired his decision to all his 
followers and at once went out to speak for the 
Union — beginning in Illinois itself. ISIever had he 
been so eloquent — not Demosthenes or Mirabeau or 
Patrick Henry were greater, his hearers declared. 
His courage and patriotism at this critical moment 
were remembered the longer because this was his 
last campaign. He died suddenly only a few weeks 
after the first call for troops to defend the Union. 

In the South the same thing was happening. Every 
man, woman, and child put himself and everything 
he had at the command of the Confederate Govern- 
ment. There they did not call themselves rebels, 
of course. They were defending their country — a 
country which they believed they had a right to 
form. 

If Mr. Lincoln believed — and he seemed at first 
to have the idea — that the North would find it easy 
to overthrow the South, he soon was disappointed. 
The great army which gathered around Washington 
had its first trial in July of 1861 — only a few miles 
south of Washington, at a place called Bull Run. 
The battle was on a Sunday, and a good many men 
went in carriages or on horseback down into Vir- 
ginia to see it. But before night they were back in 
hot haste — the Northern army had been defeated, 



Armed with a Single Purpose 179 

and was in retreat. It looked at first as if Washing- 
ton itself might be captured. 

It was a terrible shock to the confident North, and 
a horrible disappointment to Mr. Lincoln, Why 
had it happened? That was what he set himself to 
decide. What was their weakness? While he was 
trying to find this out, a great many men were trying 
to make out that it was not defeat but a panic caused 
by teamsters and sight-seers. "I see," Mr. Lincoln 
said one day to one of these people, "we whipped 
the enemy and then ran away from him." 

He was not the man to conceal or explain away 
a reverse or to shirk his responsibility in connection 
with one. He knew that the Constitution made the 
President of the United States the commander in 
chief of the army and navy, and that, though he had 
a War Department and a Navy Department and 
many officers and admirals, he must bear the burden 
for whatever went wrong. The battle of Bull Run 
was his defeat. How could he prevent another? 

Mr. Lincoln believed that the defeat was charge- 
able largely to green soldiers and inexperienced of- 
ficers. He knew the battle had been fought before 
the army was ready because the North had been long 
urging, at the top of its voice, "On to Richmond." 
The North must learn patience. He must have a 
trained and disciplined army that would not be 
stampeded by a panic of its teamsters if Richmond 
was to be taken. For this he must have a com- 
mander who knew the business of training and in 
whom the North would have confidence. There was 
one man who seemed to be fit for the place, Gen. 



i8o Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

George B. McClellan, who had been doing work in 
West Virginia of which the country thought well, 
and it was General McClellan that Lincoln now made 
commander of the Department of the Potomac with 
an order to prepare the army to take Richmond. 

The camp in which this work was to be done was 
on the heights across the river from Washington, 
and in the next month nobody had eyes for any other 
field. It was the army they all believed would win 
the war, so why trouble about the smaller armies 
scattered in Missouri, Kentucky, or Tennessee? No 
request of McClellan's was denied — men and money 
flowed freely to him. And he did his part, rapidly 
turning the awkward, untrained squads into splendid, 
efficient companies. 

All through the fall of 1861 the country watched 
the new army drilling and maneuvering, improving 
its camp, building fortifications around Washing- 
ton, and daily becoming more wonderful to look at. 
Thousands came to look at it, too, and conducted by 
members of Congress or the Cabinet, made sight- 
seeing visits through the camp or watched the bril- 
liant reviews. 

No visitor came oftener to McClellan's camp 
than Mr. Lincoln himself, and none gave closer at- 
tention to every detail of camp life, spoke to more 
private soldiers, asked more questions of the officers. 
His hope, like that of the country, was in this great 
army which McClellan was bringing into such per- 
fect form. 

But as the winter approached people became anx- 



Armed with a Single Purpose i8i 

ious. Why did not this wonderful army do some- 
thing? Everything had been done for it ; why not on 
to Richmond? Mr. Lincoln, who had felt strongly 
that McClellan should not be asked to move until 
he was ready, finally began to prod him; but always 
the general had excuses — the army lacked this or 
that; the enemy outnumbered him; he was not ready. 
He trained and trained and trained, but advance he 
would not. 

As the pressure of the government and the de- 
mand of the country became stronger, he became 
apparently more obstinate in his resolve not to move 
until he chose, and to Mr. Lincoln he became actu- 
ally insolent, often keeping him waiting when he 
came to his headquarters, as well as saying con- 
temptuous things about him which were repeated 
over the country. Mr. Lincoln was very patient 
under all this. When one day he had been kept 
waiting half an hour by the general and some indig- 
nant friend resented it, he said, "I will hold McClel- 
lan's horse if he will give us a victory." 

It was not McClellan's insolence that troubled 
him, it was a fear that, splendid as the general might 
be as a maker of armies, he was not the one to use 
them. McClellan was troubled by what he called 
the "slows ;" he was not a fighter. And he must have 
a fighter. Was there one anywhere? 

He began to study carefully day by day what the 
commanding officers in other fields were doing. He 
was like the leader of a league ball team, who must 
be keeping his eye on the teams of the country to see 



1 82 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

what new and promising talent is developing so that 
he will be ready, when somebody fails him, to put his 
hand on material in which there is hope. 

Almost every day and often at night he went to 
the telegraph office, which was only across the street 
from the White House, and, sitting by the desk of 
the telegraph operator, looked over the big grist of 
telegrams which were constantly coming in, study- 
ing each man's work. He began to send many let- 
ters and telegrams to these officers, asking them 
questions, giving them advice, urging them to be 
more cautious here or to be more daring there. He 
encouraged them to action, praised them if they suc- 
ceeded, and came quickly to their relief if they failed. 
Every officer in the long chain which the North was 
trying to stretch around the Confederacy soon began 
to see that the President's eye was on him. He be- 
gan to understand, too, that he could not fool the 
President, that he might be a civilian but that he had 
a surprising sense of military affairs. 

This understanding on Mr. Lincoln's part was no 
accident. He had been working night and day to fit 
himself to play his part as a commander in chief by 
learning something of military science. He read the 
best books on the subject, talked them over with the 
educated officers of the army, and applied what he 
learned to his own problem. That is, he did what 
he had done back in 1832 when he saw a chance to 
earn his living by surveying instead of by the hard 
labor of rail-splitting and flatboat steering; when he 
made up his mind in 1849 to let politics alone and 



Armed with a Single Purpose 183 

become a first class lawyer — he studied night and day 
the science he must practice. 

His military problem, he saw, was to pen up the 
Confederates in their own States — not only prevent- 
ing them from invading the North but from trading 
with any part of this or any other country. You can 
imagine him studying out on the great map which 
hung in his office in the White House what must be 
done to shut them in. The western boundary of the 
Southern Confederacy was made up of Texas, Ar- 
kansas, and Missouri ; its northern boundary of Ken- 
tucky, West Virginia, and Maryland. On the east 
was the Atlantic and on the south the Gulf of Mex- 
ico. Mr. Lincoln saw that, if possible, he must 
drive the defenders of the Confederacy east 
of the Mississippi, bringing that river under 
Union control and giving him New Orleans and 
its port. He must hold his northern line and 
blockade the Atlantic and Gulf ports so that the 
Confederates could neither get in nor out. This was 
the general plan. The first and far and away the 
most important part of this plan was to take Rich- 
mond, which had been made the capital of the enemy 
government when Virginia joined the Confederacy. 
If this plan of penning up the Confederacy, opening 
the Mississippi, and capturing Richmond was to be 
promptly carried out, Mr. Lincoln realized early in 
the war that it must be by outmatching the enemy in 
strategy. He had the greater numbers, but the ene- 
my was quicker on his feet. "We must fail," he told 
one of his generals in January of 1862, while he was 



184 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

waiting in vain for McClellan to move, "unless we 
find some way of making our advantage an over- 
match for his ; this can only be done by menacing him 
with superior forces at different points at the same 
time, so that we can safely attack one or both if he 
makes no change; and if he weakens one to 
strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strength- 
ened one, and seize and hold the weakened one, gain- 
ing so much." 

This idea of threatening at two points so as to 
tempt the enemy to divide his forces, and of attack- 
ing quickly any point known to be weakened would be 
good strategy in any game, you will agree. Mr. 
Lincoln constantly urged it on his generals. Once 
when Lee had stretched his line in Virginia over a 
long distance, he telegraphed to General Hooker, 
then the commander of the Army of the Potomac : 
"If the head of Lee's army is at Martinsburg and 
the tail of it on the plank road between Fredericks- 
burg and Chancellorsville, the animal must be very 
slim somewhere. Could you not break him?" 

But this kind of strategy, which he saw almost at 
the start to be essential if the Union armies were to 
outmatch those of the South, was the very strategy 
he found his generals were the slowest to under- 
stand and adopt. 

It was not only military science which interested 
him, but everything connected with the job of war. 
He was especially keen on getting better rifles, and 
inventors found that frequently when they could get 
no hearing at the War Department, Mr. Lincoln 
would take time to test their guns himself. He had 



Armed with a Single Purpose 185 

found a clerk in the Navy Department who was as 
interested as he in firearms, and whenever he got his 
hands on a new rifle he would ask this man to "go 
shooting" with him. His target was usually a sheet 
of white government note paper pinned to a tree. 
From this he would pace off eighty to one hundred 
feet, take a quick aim, and often put almost every 
bullet through the paper. He enjoyed the sport 
like a boy. 

The balloon began to be used early in the war for 
observation purposes, and Mr. Lincoln delighted in 
watching it sailing over Washington or swaying 
above the troops. It was he, too, who insisted that 
John Ericsson, the famous Swedish inventor, should 
have a chance to try out the plans for an armored 
monitor which he wanted to build. 

Ericsson's idea was to mount on a raft a round 
turret furnished with guns and to encase the whole 
thing in armor. Up to that time our navy was built 
entirely of wood, and there was doubt about whether 
it was possible to use armor. Mr. Lincoln's en- 
couragement of Ericsson proved one of the most 
fortunate things in the early part of the war. 

The Confederates, ahead of the Unionists in 
using the idea, had already covered the "Merrimac" 
with plate. When she came out of the Norfolk navy 
yard she destroyed two big wooden Union vessels, 
with almost no trouble at all. They, of course, had 
not a shadow of a chance against her iron sides. 
There was terror throughout the North at this re- 
sult. What could not the "Merrimac" do in their 
ports if the Confederates sent her out? No gun 



1 86 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

could touch her. What would she do to Washington 
if she came up the Potomac? 

The answer came quickly. The queer ironclad 
thing that John Ericsson had built was already on 
its way south. It came in such a hurry that it was 
actually finished on the way. When the "Merrimac" 
steamed out the morning after the "Monitor" ar- 
rived, to sink another wooden ship, she was faced 
by what looked like "a cheese box on a raft." John 
Ericsson's "Monitor" might look queer, but it didn't 
take her long so to batter the "Merrimac" that she 
was glad to retreat. This contest was the beginning 
of the ironclad navies of the world. People in 
Washington who were impatient with the President's 
willingness to try out new ideas were a little more 
respectful after this experience. 

The close study Mr. Lincoln was giving to mili- 
tary matters was far from making him cocksure or 
domineering. His generals ought to know better 
than he did. He had put them there to do certain 
work. He must give them a chance — not "meddle ;" 
but generals who, like McClellan, thought Mr. Lin- 
coln's patience weakness were sure, sooner or later, 
to learn their mistake. His patience had a limit. As 
soon as he was convinced that a man was not doing 
what he had been given a fair chance to do, he be- 
came every inch commander in chief. This was long 
happening in McClellan's case. It is probable that 
the general thought Mr. Lincoln would not dare to 
order him to move until he made the sign. He 
thought he was too popular with the army — there 
was no general in all the Civil War more beloved 



Armed with a Single Purpose 187 

by his soldiers than General McClellan — too popu- 
lar in the North. He was mistaken. In January, 
1862, Mr. Lincoln asserted himself and ordered a 
general advance on the entire front on Washington's 
birthday, February 2 2d. The country was jubilant. 
The war was going on. 

McClellan disobeyed, making all his old excuses 
— and his disobedience cost him dear, for it turned a 
great part of the public against him. They began to 
call him "the Virginia creeper," and even a traitor 
who did not mean to fight — a most unjust charge. It 
was not until April that finally he was pried from 
his camp and the march on Richmond began. 

He moved, but not by the route which Mr. Lincoln 
thought the common-sense one, directly across Vir- 
ginia to Richmond, fighting as he went. He took his 
army down the Potomac, landed it on the Peninsula, 
and from there advanced. Mr. Lincoln, of course, 
had the power to compel the general to follow the 
plan he preferred, but he argued that, even suppos- 
ing his was the wiser way, no man does as well on a 
plan which he has been forced to adopt as on one 
he has worked out for himself. The President 
therefore consented to the Peninsular Campaign, 
making one condition, that a certain fixed number of 
troops should be left to protect Washington. 

If you will look at a map you will see why this was 
necessary. By taking the army down the Potomac 
the route from Richmond to Washington was left 
open. The Confederate commander in chief. Gen- 
eral Robert E. Lee, was too able a soldier to miss 
such a chance — that Mr. Lincoln knew. He knew, 



1 88 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

too, that General Lee had officers under him who 
were masters of quick dashes on weak spots — that is, 
General Lee had none of McClellan's reluctance to 
taking a chance — Washington must not be left ex- 
posed. But McClellan did not leave behind the 
troops agreed upon, and when Mr. Lincoln found 
this out he ordered them back. Moreover, when- 
ever in the four months' campaign he thought the 
Washington garrison weak, he held back troops 
McClellan wanted and expected. It gave the general 
a grievance — a reason for his failure to reach Rich- 
mond, for, though he did advance to within a few 
miles of the city, did do some brilliant fighting, in 
July he was obliged to fall back on the James River. 
The real reason of his failure was probably the 
reason that he had tarried so long in his training 
camp; overcaution, exaggeration of the enemies' 
numbers and equipment. As a fact he seems always 
to have had the larger force, but he had none of the 
dash, the mobility, the ingenuity of the Confeder- 
ates. At the outset of the campaign, for instance, 
he delayed a month before Yorktown, making the 
most scientific and elaborate preparation to reduce 
It, only to find when he attacked, that the enemy had 
gone! 

When Mr. Lincoln saw that the campaign on 
which the North had rested all its hopes for so long 
was a failure, he was, as he said, as nearly incon- 
solable as he could be and live. His disappointment 
came as the climax to a series of private as well as 
public troubles through all this year and a quarter 
of war. He was a man who could not bear to see 



Armed with a Single Purpose 189 

stranger or friend hurt — even disappointed. He 
had a friendly heart, which needed for its own con- 
tent to see all the world happy. War and the cal- 
culated killing of men was a hideous thing to him. 
And yet he had to be responsible for a war, and from 
the start that war had taken from him people that 
he loved dearly. 

One of the first of these was an Illinois boy, Elmer 
E. Ellsworth. Young Ellsworth had been known all 
over the country as the leader of the Chicago Zou- 
aves — a military organization which both by its uni- 
form and its brilliant maneuvering had been the envy 
of boys and young men everywhere. Mr. Lincoln 
brought Ellsworth to Washington and made him a 
colonel in the volunteer service. In May, 1861, he 
was one of the officers of an expedition sent across 
the Potomac to drive the enemy from Arlington and 
Alexandria. Mr. Lincoln had been able to see from 
his windows in Washington a Confederate flag, fly- 
ing from a staff in this territory; and it had been a 
great annoyance to him. As the Union force ap- 
proached this flag, young Ellsworth dashed ahead 
and tore it from its staff, but as he did so a ball 
struck and killed him. His death hurt Mr. Lincoln 
cruelly. He immediately wrote to Colonel Ells- 
worth's parents — the first of many tender letters of 
consolation which he was to write before the war 
was over. 

"Washington, D. C, May 25, 1861, 
"To the Father and Mother of 
Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth, 
"My dear Sir and Madame: In the untimely loss of your 
noble son, our affliction here is scarcely less than your own. 



igo Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

So much of promised usefulness to one's country, and of bright 
hopes for one's self and friends, have never been so suddenly 
dashed as in his fall. In size, in years, and in youthful ap- 
pearance a boy only, his power to command men was surpass- 
ingly great. This power, combined with a fine intellect and 
indomitable energy', and a taste altogether military, constituted 
in him, as seemed to me, the best natural talent in that depart- 
ment I ever knew. 

"And yet he was singularly modest and deferential in social 
intercourse. My acquaintance with him began less than two 
years ago; yet, through the latter half of the intervening period, 
it was as intense as the disparity of our ages and my engrossing 
engagements would permit. To me he appeared to have no 
indulgences or pastimes, and I never heard him utter a profane 
or an intemperate word. What was conclusive of his good 
heart, he never forgot his parents. The honors he labored for 
so laudably, and for which, in the sad end, he so gallantly gave 
his life, he meant for them no less than for himself. 

"In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness 
of your sorrow, I have ventured to address you this tribute to 
the memory of my young friend, and your brave and early 
fallen son. 

"May God give you the consolation which is beyond all 
earthly power. Sincerely your friend in common affliction, 

"A. Lincoln." 

In October the President received a second blow, 
even heavier. This was at the battle of Ball's Bluff, 
where one of his dearest and oldest Illinois friends. 
Colonel E. D, Baker, was killed. The President was 
at General McClellan's headquarters when the news 
came In. He did not wait to hear more, but with 
bowed head, tears rolling down his cheeks, his face 
pale and wan, passed out of the building. One of 
the newspaper correspondents, watching him, noted 
that he almost fell as he stepped into the street and 



Armed with a Single Purpose 191 

that, as he walked to the White House, both hands 
were pressed upon his heart. 

In February, sorrow came still closer to him, into 
his own family, when Willie Lincoln, now eleven 
years old, the elder of the two boys with Mr. and 
Mrs. Lincoln in the White House, fell ill and died. 
He was the one of the three sons most like Mr. Lin- 
coln himself — gentle, reflective, and studious. "Just 
such a boy as I was at his age," Mr. Lincoln used 
to say as he watched Willie puzzling over his prob- 
lems or absorbed in his reading. His father's elec- 
tion, the trip to Washington, the coming of the war, 
had all been of deepest interest to Willie Lincoln. 
He kept a journal, a scrapbook, and many souvenirs. 
After the battle of Ball's Bluff, where his father's 
friend. Colonel Baker, was killed, he wrote some 
boyish verses in memory of the soldiers killed, which 
were published in a Washington paper. All of these 
interests of Willie endeared him especially to Mr. 
Lincoln, and his death was a blow from which it was 
very difficult for him to recover. 

It came at a moment, too — February of 1862 — 
when he was finding it hard to get his plans for 
prosecuting the war carried out, and when he was 
receiving from all sides the most bitter criticism. It 
seemed sometimes as if everybody in Washington 
and in the country felt that he knew better how to 
run the war than Mr. Lincoln did. Hundreds of 
men — and women — came to tell him what he ought 
to do. Congress badgered him from morning till 
night, great commissions visited him. He heard 



192 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

them all. He must know what people were think- 
ing, and perhaps there might be in the mob some- 
body who had something of value to offer. It would 
not do to let a helpful idea slip for lack of a little 
patience. What he feared in all this tumult of com- 
plaint and advice and angry excitement was that good 
men doing their best might be forced out of position, 
that the plans which he was working out painfully 
and slowly would be upset and all the little headway 
lost. 

"Gentlemen," he said one day to some particularly 
excited and unreasonable visitors, "suppose all the 
property you are worth was in gold, and you had put 
it in the hands of Blondin, to carry across the 
Niagara River on a rope. Would you shake the 
cable or keep shouting at him, 'Blondin, stand up 
a little straighter; Blondin, stoop a little more; go a 
little faster; lean a little more to the north; lean a 
little more to the south?' No, you would hold your 
breath as well as your tongue, and keep your hands 
off until he was safe over. The government is 
carrying an enormous weight. Untold treasures are 
in their hands; they are doing the very best they can. 
Don't badger them. Keep silence, and we will get 
you safe across." 

You can imagine how the people shook the cable 
when they heard of McClellan's failure to take 
Richmond. Mr. Lincoln had not only to bear their 
outcries but the anger of JMcClellan, who took no 
blame for the way things had turned out. As he 
fell back he wired to Washington: "A few more 
thousand men would have changed this battle from a 



Armed with a Single Purpose 193 

defeat to a victory. If I save this army now I tell 
you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any 
person in Washington. You have done your best to 
sacrifice this army." 

It was a cruel charge, and not a just one ; but Mr. 
Lincoln seems to have sensed what McClellan was 
suffering over the cutting to pieces of his splendid 
troops, and his replies to the cries of pain and anger 
that came from the general were kind if firm. "I 
give you all I can and act on the presumption that 
you will do the best you can with what you have, 
while you continue ungenerously, I think, to assume 
that I could give you more if I would. I feel any 
misfortune to you and your army quite as keenly as 
you feel it yourself. If you have had a drawn battle, 
or a repulse, it is the price we pay for the enemy not 
being in Washington. We protected Washington 
and the enemy concentrated on you. Had we 
stripped Washington he would have been upon us 
before the troops could have gotten to you." 

Nor did he fail, stricken as he was by the falling 
back of the army, to thank McClellan for the "hero- 
ism and skill" which he showed in this withdrawal. 
It would be "forever appreciated," he told him, and 
he added, "If you can hold your present position we 
shall hive the enemy yet." 

Mr. Lincoln went down to camp to look things 
over. He was inclined to let McClellan try again, 
but the country and his advisers would have none of 
it. They were done with McClellan. Mr. Lincoln 
himself could not save him, and in August he called 
him back from the Peninsula to his old position 



194 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

across the Potomac from Washington. McClellan 
was heartbroken over the order; but, as it turned 
out, it gave him another great chance. 

While he had been gone, Mr. Lincoln, in order to 
be sure that there were sufficient forces between 
Washington and Richmond, had formed the Army 
of Virginia and called from the West General John 
Pope to command it. When McClellan left the 
James, Lee saw his chance and hurried north to at- 
tack Pope. In the second battle of Bull Run at the 
end of August, Lee thrashed Pope soundly and broke 
his army to bits. This done, he raced for Maryland. 

In the panic that seized Washington, Mr. Lincoln 
kept his head. Pope had failed. McClellan was on 
the ground. He knew he understood "licking an 
army into shape" and so, in spite of what anybody 
might or did say, he ordered him to take full charge, 
to rally the distracted troops, overtake Lee, defeat 
him, and destroy his army. 

For once McClellan acted with promptness. He 
whipped the army into shape, raced after Lee, over- 
took him at Antietam in Maryland, and defeated 
him. But he did not pursue him. Though Lee's 
army was hardly half his in size and far from its 
base, McClellan let him get away while he stopped 
to rest. For six weeks he lay there "resting" with 
Lee scarcely fifty miles away! 

Mr. Lincoln stood it as long as he could and then 
put bluntly to McClellan facts about his generalship 
which were as true in the winter of 1861 and 1862 — 
as true in the Peninsula campaign as they were now. 
He was "overcautious" — overcautious when he 



Armed with a Single Purpose 195 

should be bold. He was assuming that he could not 
do what Lee was constantly doing; that he could not 
feed an army where Lee and his generals were feed- 
ing one ; could not move by wagon though Lee was 
doing it over twice the distance with half the wagons. 
"One of the standard maxims of war is to operate 
upon the enemy's communications as much as pos- 
sible," he told McClellan, "without exposing your 
own. You seem to act as if this applies against you 
but cannot apply in your favor." Did McClellan 
admit that Lee was more than his equal on a march? 
Were not the roads as good for him as for Lee? 
Was it not unmanly to say that our troops could not 
march as well as Lee's? Pursue him — fight him. 
"If we cannot beat him where he is now, we never 
can he again being within the entrenchments of Rich- 
mond." 

If anything could stiffen a man's pride, shame 
him to bestir himself, it would seem that such a let- 
ter would; but McClellan did not budge. His 
horses had sore tongues, were fatigued, he wired. 
And Mr. Lincoln, breaking out into that sarcasm 
of which he was a master but which he so controlled, 
wired McClellan, "Will you pardon me for asking 
what the horses of your army have done since An- 
tietam that fatigues anything?" 

His patience was reaching the breaking point 
again. He must have a general who would move 
as well as train, pursue as well as fight, and on No- 
vember 7th, nearly two months after the battle of 
Antietam, he removed the general. McClellan had 
had his last chance in the army, and lost. But as 



196 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

we are to see later, he was not through with Mr. 
Lincoln. The time was to come, when he was to 
cross swords on another field — that of politics. 

If the general had been overcautious, as Mr. Lin- 
coln charged, surely he had himself been overpatient; 
but we would not be able to say this of him if he 
had felt sure at any time for many months that he 
had in all his armies a better man than McClellan. 
He was by no means sure that General Ambrose 
Burnside, whom he now appointed to command the 
Army of the Potomac, would do better. But he 
was the best material he saw. 

It was an unhappy choice. Burnside failed him, 
failed him in December at the battle of Fredericks- 
burg, where 10,000 dead and wounded Union sol- 
diers were left on the field and 2,000 were missing. 
After his defeat Burnside showed no ability to pull 
his troops together and put new heart into them. 
He must have another general. There was another 
man, like Burnside a corps commander under Mc- 
Clellan, "Fightin' Joe" Hooker, whom he had been 
watching. He had faults which Mr. Lincoln feared, 
but he had qualities, too. He decided to try him, 
but in appointing him he bravely laid all his doubts 
before the general. Read the letter and see how 
"square" and kind it is. No wonder that Hooker 
said, "It is just such a letter as a father might write 
to his son." 

"General: I have placed you at the head of the Army of 
the Potomac. Of course I have done this upon what appears to 
me to be sufficient reasons, and yet I think it best for you to 
know that there are some things in regard to which I am not 



- Armed with a single Purpose 197 

quite satisfied with you. I believe you to be a brave and 
skillful soldier, which of course I like. I also believe you do 
not mix politics with your profession, in which you are right. 
You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable if not 
an indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which, within 
reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm; but I thmk 
that during General Burnside's command of the army you have 
taken counsel of your ambition and thwarted him as much 
as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, 
and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I 
have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently 
saying that both the army and the government needed a 
dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, 
that I have given you the command. Only those generals who 
gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you 
is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. The gov- 
ernment will support you to the utmost of its ability, which 
is neither more nor less than it has done and will do for all 
commanders. I much fear that the spirit which you have 
aided to infuse into the army, of criticizing their commander 
and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you. 
I shall assist you as far as I can to put it down. Neither you 
nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good 
out of an army while such a spirit prevails in it; and now 
beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy and 
sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories. 
"Yours very truly, 

"A. Lincoln." 

What a pity that Hooker no more than Burn- 
side was the man; for he, like Burnside, gave the 
overburdened President not only another defeat — 
that of Chancellorsville in May — not only a defeat, 
but he let Lee slip by him, cross the Potomac, and 
make for Pennsylvania. Hooker took after him in 
hot haste, but resigned on the way; and into his 
place went a third corps commander from the Army 
of the Potomac, General George Meade. 



198 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

Now the question was: What could Meade do? 
Could he overtake Lee and defeat him as McClel- 
lan had done at Antietam? And if so, what would 
he then do? Pursue him or let him go? We have 
learned enough of Mr. Lincoln's determination to 
find a fighting, pursuing leader, to be sure that un- 
less Meade did both he, too, would be replaced. 



CHAPTER IX 

STEADY IN STORMS 

Beautiful he was with that which none may scorn — 
With love of God and man and things forlorn, 
And freedom mighty as the soul in him. 
Large at the helm of state he leans and looms 
With the grave, kindly look of those who die 
Doing their duty. 

Madison Cawein. 

MR. LINCOLN'S anxiety was acute over 
what General Meade would do, now that 
he had taken charge of the Army of the 
Potomac, in the very middle of its chase into Penn- 
sylvania after Lee. When Meade did overtake Lee 
at Gettysburg and the battle, which was to last three 
days, began on the morning of July i, 1863, the 
President sat hour after hour beside the telegraph 
instrument, or, in his eagerness, rose and leaned 
over the cipherer as he translated the dispatch. By 
the end of the third day he was utterly worn out, 
and the Secretary of War, Mr. Stanton, persuaded 
him to go home to get a little rest, promising that, 
if any definite news came in the night, to let him 
know. 

It was close to midnight when the telegram finally 
came in, announcing the great victory. Mr. Stan- 
ton seized the dispatch and ran at the top of his 
199 



200 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

speed to the White House and up the stairs to Mr. 
Lincoln's sleeping room. "Who's there?" called 
the President. When he heard the word "Stanton" 
he did not wait for dressing gown or trousers, but 
pulled open the door, "in the shortest nightshirt and 
longest legs," Mr. Stanton used to say in telling the 
story, "I ever saw on a human being." Stanton was 
out of breath, but Lincoln read the news in his face, 
and, seizing him by the shoulders, danced him round 
and round the room until both of them were ex- 
hausted. They then sat down on a trunk, and the 
President, still in his nightshirt, read over and over 
again the telegram which had brought him unspeak- 
able relief and joy. 

When General Lee retreated from Gettysburg, it 
was toward the Potomac. A heavy rain fell as he 
went, making the river almost impassable. It gave 
Meade a wonderful chance, for, hurt and exhausted 
as his army was, it was still much larger than Lee's 
— no more exhausted, and behind it was a friendly 
country. Lee, no doubt, expected an attack on the 
north side of the Potomac, but it did not come. 
Even when his army was divided in the crossing, 
Meade did nothing. 

Mr. Lincoln's despair over this inaction was al- 
most unbearable. Once over the river, the Union 
forces, he said bitterly, would be quite as likely to 
capture the man in the moon as any part of Lee's 
army. His disappointment was embittered by some- 
thing very hard for a man of his frank and open na- 
ture to bear, and that was suspicion of General 
Meade's sympathy with his policies. It seemed to 



Steady in Storms 201 

him as if Meade and his generals wanted Lee to 
cross the river, wanted him to get away. He was 
within Meade's easy grasp, and to have closed upon 
him would have ended the war. The opportunity 
was gone. Could it be that Meade was tainted 
with that sympathy for secession that had crept all 
through the North, until it was so strong that in 
recent months it had come boldly into the open and 
fearlessly raised its ugly head. 

Mr. Lincoln knew well enough that the growth of 
this sympathy — "copperheadism," as its worst form 
was called — came largely from dislike by many peo- 
ple both in and out of his own party for what he 
had been doing about slavery. 

He had made it quite clear at the beginning of 
the war, you remember, that he thought he had no 
right to touch slavery in the States where the Con- 
stitution had left it. He fought to save the Union. 
But the war was only a few months old when he 
realized he must do something. The anti-slavery 
people wanted him to set the slaves free. They 
seemed to think that if he would he could abolish 
slavery by his simple word. It would be like the 
Pope's bull against the comet, he told them. The 
South could laugh at such an order as long as they 
were victorious; tell him to come and take the 
slaves. 

He couldn't do that; but there was one thing that 
he was willing to do and that was to ask Congress 
to buy the slaves of any State that would emanci- 
pate them — buy them and colonize them in some 
unsettled part of the country where they could be- 



202 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

come self-supporting and self-directing. Through 
all the months he was occupied with building up an 
army and trying to get it to do something, he was 
working on this scheme of buying and freeing, which 
he called "compensated emancipation." He wanted 
the Border States — those States which lay midway 
between North and South and which both sides were 
trying to win over — to accept this offer. They were 
losing their slaves by the hundreds. If they would 
free them, the United States would pay for them. 
If they did not do it, they would lose them all sooner 
or later, anyway, through the wear and tear of war. 
But, though Mr. Lincoln begged and argued with 
the Border States to accept his plan, they would not 
touch it. Nor did the North have any enthusiasm 
about it. It wanted him either to let the negroes 
entirely alone or else free them all by a proclama- 
tion — the kind of proclamation which would have 
done no good because it could not have been en- 
forced. 

He went very slowly in the matter, determined to 
do nothing that the Constitution, which was the book 
of rules he was following, did not allow. He knew 
it allowed him to do anything with property which 
was necessary to save the Union from being de- 
stroyed. Slaves were property. Anything he did 
with them to save the Union was constitutional. But 
even supposing he could and did free all or certain 
slaves, how was that going to help him save the 
Union? There were certain things that he would 
win at once; he would stop the back fire the Aboli- 
tionists had kindled and were feeding — and that 



Steady in Storms 203 

would help. He would take laborers from the fields 
and workshops of the South and would gain sol- 
diers (he meant to arm the negro) for the armies 
of the North and laborers for her workshops — and 
that would help. 

He would probably prevent England and France 
from recognizing the Confederacy. England and 
France did not understand or sympathize with Mr. 
Lincoln's feeling about the Union. They could not 
see why the South did not have a right to set up for 
herself if she wanted to; but Mr. Lincoln knew that 
if they saw that the success of the North meant the 
destruction of slavery they would probably refuse to 
recognize the Confederacy — and that would help. 

But if he might gain, he also stood to lose. If 
he put out the back fire of the Abolitionist, he might 
kindle that of the Copperhead. What use would he 
have for negro soldiers and negro laborers if by the 
making of them he lost white soldiers and white la- 
borers? What would he gain by silencing England 
and France if in so doing he turned the Border 
States against him? 

In the summer of 1862, when things were going 
from bad to worse in the army, he made up his mind 
that he must try new tactics or he would lose the 
war and that the strongest new weapon, although 
a dangerous one, would be some form of emancipa- 
tion — so he set to work. He was getting ready, but 
he would not be hurried. 

Men who knew that Mr. Lincoln hated slavery 
as few men ever had, who remembered how he had 
fought against its extension, wondered. Why did 



204 ^oy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

he hesitate? "A man watches his pear tree day 
after day," he told one of them, "impatient for the 
ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the 
process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But 
let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length 
falls into his lap." 

When Horace Greeley, the powerful editor of 
the New York Tribune, tried to drive him by prayers 
and abuse, he silenced him by a letter which is a 
model for those of us who really want people to un- 
derstand what we intend to do and why we intend 
to do it : 

"As to the policy I 'seem to be pursuing,' as you say, I have 
not meant to leave any one in doubt. 

"I would save the Union. 

"I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. 

"The sooner the national authority can be restored, the 
nearer the Union will be 'the Union as it was.' 

"If there be those who would not save the Union unless they 
could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. 
If there be those who would not save the Union unless they 
could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with 
them. 

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, 
and is not either to save or destroy slavery. 

"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I 
would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, 
I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and 
leaving others alone, I would also do that. 

"What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do 
because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I 
forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to 
save the Union. 

"I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing 
hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe 
doing more will help the cause. 



Steady in Storms 205 

"I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and 
I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true 
views." 

It would seem as if nobody could have had any 
doubts about his intentions after that. 

It was in September of 1862 that the time finally 
came when he believed that what he had been get- 
ting ready to do about slavery would help the Union. 
He had been waiting for a victory, he said, fearing 
that if he issued the proclamation he had prepared 
while the armies were retreating it would seem like 
a last shriek. But he had promised God that if He 
would give him a victory, he would issue it. The 
victory came at Antietam, as you know. 

The night before that battle, Mr. Lincoln had that 
same dream that he had had before the fall of Fort 
Sumter. He was on a singular and indescribable 
vessel, sailing toward a dark and indefinite shore. 
But this time, when he reached the shore, there was 
light, not darkness, as after Sumter, for McClellan 
had driven Lee back. Mr. Lincoln kept his word 
to his Maker. 

The proclamation he sent out said that on the 
first day of January, 1863, all the slaves in States 
in rebellion should be "then, thenceforward and for- 
ever free." It also said that the United States 
would "recognize and maintain" this freedom. Of 
course this did not destroy slavery — it simply prom- 
ised to free certain slaves in case the rebellion went 
on, and it also gave the States in rebellion the chance 
to save their slaves if they would lay down their 
arms. 



2o6 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

When the first day of January came, Mr. Lincoln 
signed the proclamation. The writing is slightly 
tremulous — "Not because of any uncertainty on my 
part," Mr. Lincoln told some who noticed it, "but 
because I signed just after three hours' handshaking 
at the New Year's reception." 

He was sure he had done right. He was sure 
he had the right to do what he had done, but he 
knew he was in for a stormy time, that if he had 
spiked some guns by his proclamation he had brought 
other guns into action. He looked them all smil- 
ingly in the muzzle, and sized up the situation one 
day to his Cabinet: "We are like a lot of whalers 
who have been long on the chase. We have at last 
got the harpoon in the monster and we must now 
look out how we steer him or, with one flap of his 
tail, he will send us all into eternity." 

It certainly seemed at times as if they might as 
well give up trying to steer the monster, so terribly 
did he plunge and leap. The most serious thing 
was that thousands of people in the North declared 
that Mr. Lincoln had changed the purpose of the 
war: he had made it one to abolish slavery. That 
is, they refused to accept Mr. Lincoln's idea that 
what he did about slavery was in order to save the 
Union. 

The result of the Emancipation Proclamation 
which hurt and alarmed Mr. Lincoln most was that 
it turned multitudes of the common soldiers in the 
army against him. They had not gone into the army 
to free slaves, they said, and so in droves they ran 
away. 



Steady in Storms 207 

It hurt him because he loved them — felt that he 
understood them and that they somehow had sensed 
this love and understanding. Washington lay so 
close to the big Eastern armies that streams of sol- 
diers were constantly pouring south through the 
town. As they loitered about sight-seeing or pleas- 
ure-seeking in their hours off they often ran across 
the President whose habit of early rising, of going 
out himself for his newspapers, of unexpectedly 
turning up at the Capitol, the arsenal, or on the 
street gave them a chance to speak to him often to 
ask a favor. 

They found it simple to see him at the White 
House, too. If the orderlies stopped them with the 
word that the President was "busy," "not receiv- 
ing," "with the Cabinet," they had a powerful friend 
in Tad Lincoln. Tad had a great love for all sol- 
diers and a great contempt for orders and rules. 
If he was within hearing the chances are that he 
would seize the disappointed soldier by the hand and 
pushing aside guards drag him straight to his father 
with a demand that his story be heard. 

The frequent visits Mr. Lincoln made to the 
camps endeared him to the men. They were at once 
at home with him as he walked about, chaffing them 
over their tent housekeeping — even now and then 
swapping stories with them or measuring with the 
unusually tall ones. He seemed much more one of 
them than their officers. One thing that delighted 
them and of which they often talked was his horse- 
manship. At the first grand review of McClellan's 
army there had been among the officers a good deal 



208 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

of contemptuous fun over the idea of the President's 
riding beside General McClellan, who was known 
for his splendid horsemanship, and who they sus- 
pected to be not unwilling to "show off" at the ex- 
pense of the President. A man who saw the review 
and knew how the officers were talking, says that 
when the day came a spirited black horse was se- 
lected for the President to ride. Mr. Lincoln 
calmly walked up to the animal, and the instant he 
seized the bridle to mount it was evident to horse- 
men that he "knew his business." He had the ani- 
mal in hand at once. No sooner was he in the sad- 
dle than his mount began to prance and whirl, but 
the President sat as unconcerned as if he and the 
horse were one. The test of endurance soon came. 
McClellan, with his magnificent staff, approached the 
President, who joined them and they dashed to a 
distant part of the field. The artillery began to 
thunder, the drums beat, and the bands struck up 
"Hail to the Chief." While the troops cheered, 
Mr. Lincoln lifted his tall hat from his head and, 
holding the bridle rein in one hand, dashed calmly 
and easily down the long line. He could ride, and 
the soldiers were proud of him. 

It was in the hospitals in and around Washington 
that they learned to know him best. The city was 
so close to the Virginia battlefields that all through 
the war it was the headquarters of the wounded. 
After the battles they were brought back by thou- 
sands and laid in long rows on the wharves and sta- 
tions along the Potomac until the ambulances could 
carry them to the hospitals. They came in such 



Steady in Storms 209 

numbers after Fredericksburg and Chancellorsvllle, 
and later after Grant's battles in the Wilderness, 
that public buildings and private houses were used. 
In the summer Mr. Lincoln lived at the Soldiers' 
Home at the head of 7th Street, and all along his 
v/ay, as he went back and forth to the White House, 
he passed between barracks and tents filled with the 
wounded. With the soldiers in these hospitals, as 
well as those scattered about the town, he quickly 
established friendly relations. He knew many of 
the patients by name and when they were hopelessly 
wounded would send them flowers and special mes- 
sages. 

It was the youth of them that wrung his heart. 
He loved boys. You have seen how, in those days 
back in Springfield, on the circuit, while he was car- 
rying on his great fight against Douglas, he always 
had a word for any boy that crossed his path. 
When he began to see the army he was gathering, 
it was the youth of it that amazed him, as indeed it 
must amaze all who see armies in the making. He 
knew that hundreds of these soldiers were lads un- 
der eighteen who had boldly lied, and frequently 
had their lies ignored, in order to try out the great 
adventure; and he realized, particularly after Bull 
Run, how unfitted these half-grown lads were to 
stand for long the intolerable hardships of war, to 
rally quickly from wounds and exposure. 

No day in all the war was harder for him than 
that day after the defeat at Bull Run, when, through 
a dripping rain, men and boys trailed across the 
Long Bridge over the Potomac in disordered, 



210 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

ashamed, horrified squads. Their faces were coated 
with the red dust of Maryland, and the smoke and 
dirt of powder. Their clothes were thick with mud. 
Starved for food and drink, they took from the 
hands of the pitying, weeping Unionist women of 
Washington the bread and coffee which they of- 
fered them from the doors of their houses or from 
the rough counters set up along the street. And, 
fed, they dropped into doorways, into open spaces, 
anywhere there was a vacant spot, and slept and 
slept — boys of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. 

No trial, among all the many that overwhelmed 
Mr. Lincoln during the war, quite equaled that of 
allowing a soldier to be shot. It was the one thing 
about which he was ever heard to say, "I can't bear 
it." When the news of terrible defeats, like those 
of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville came, he 
might walk the floor and groan, and groan. Men 
saw his eyes sink deeper and deeper, his color change 
to a gray like that of death, his shoulders become 
more and more bent; but never did he say, "I can't 
bear it." It was only on Friday, toward the 
sunset hour, that he would walk the floor of the 
White House, saying, "They are shooting a boy out 
at such a place to-day. I can't bear it 1 I can't 
bear it!" 

Mr. Lincoln would never allow the death sen- 
tence to be carried out if he could find a shadow of 
excuse to forbid it. The Secretary of War and 
rnany of the generals in the army constantly bom- 
barded him with indignant protests against his clem- 
ency; but if he had found a reason that satisfied him. 



Steady in Storms 21 1 

or even half satisfied him, they could not shake his 
determination. Fathers and mothers and friends 
would come to beg him to save a boy. Driven 
night and day as he was by the demands made upon 
him, he would personally examine the papers, go 
himself to the telegraph office, stand over the instru- 
ment until the order had been sent to delay the sen- 
tence, not rest until he had an answer back that the 
telegram had been received and the order would be 
carried out. A boy might have run away out of 
sheer fright. Mr. Lincoln had a drawer full of 
what he called "leg cases," and he would say some- 
times in explanation of his sympathy for them that 
if God had given a man a pair of cowardly legs 
what could you expect but that he would run away I 

One of the pardons of sentenced soldiers which 
touched the country most deeply and which has gone 
into the wonderful drama of John Drinkwater, 
"i\braham Lincoln," was of a soldier that had slept 
on his post. After marching all day he had taken 
a sick comrade's place for guard duty. It was too 
much. He had fallen asleep, been discovered, and 
sentenced. Mr. Lincoln visited the army soon after 
this and, asking if there were any sentences, was 
told, yes, there was a boy to be shot on such a day. 

The President went to see him, talked with him, 
asked him to tell him about it. He could not help 
it, the condemned lad said, he was too tired, he 
didn't know he could be too tired to keep awake. 
There was no doubting the truth of his explana- 
tion, and the President, putting his arm about him, 
said, "My boy, you are not going to be shot. I am 



212 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

going to send you back to the regiment. But how 
are you going to pay my bill?" 

Dazed by the great news, he could scarcely think. 
He had a little money — his parents would mortgage 
the farm — perhaps some of his friends would help 
— they might give five or six hundred dollars. 

"It is not money I want," Mr. Lincoln told him. 
"My bill is a very large one, and there is nobody 
in the world but you can pay it. If you will prom- 
ise from now on to shirk no duty so that when you 
come to die you can say, 'I have kept my promise,' 
then your debt will be paid." 

The boy gave his word. A few months later he 
was shot in battle and while dying asked that a mes- 
sage be carried to the President. "Tell him," he 
said, "that I have tried to be a good soldier and 
that I died thinking of his kind face." 

You can understand, then, how bitter it was for 
Mr. Lincoln to know that the common soldiers whom 
he so loved were deserting because of the Eman- 
cipation Proclamation, and that they would be shot 
if caught; but he had no bitterness against them. It 
was against those back home whom he believed to 
be influencing them that his anger was directed. 
"Must I shoot a simple-minded boy who deserts," 
he said, "while I must not touch a hair of a wily 
agitator who induced him to desert? I think that 
to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only 
constitutional, but withal a great mercy." 

If the escape of Lee after Gettysburg and the re- 
volt at home and in the army were giving Mr. Lin- 
coln anxiety and suffering, he had at last a victory 



Steady in Storms 213 

in the West which took much of the sting from his 
troubles — a great, unqualified military success, a suc- 
cess not tainted like Antietam and Gettysburg had 
been by a failure to seize the advantage gained, but 
a success followed up. He believed, too, he had at 
last the thing he had sought from the start, a man 
that would fight — fight as General Lee had been 
fighting — General Ulysses S. Grant, who, on July 4, 
1863, had been able to telegraph him that Vicks- 
burg, the key to the Mississippi, which he had been 
besieging for many weeks, had fallen, its defenders 
had marched out, the Union flag was flying; at last 
the "Father of Waters went unvexed to the sea." 

The fall of Vicksburg, coming as it did on the very 
day of the battle of Gettysburg and before it was 
known that so much of the fruits of Gettysburg was 
to be lost, put heart into the North. It helped, too, 
to put an end to talk on the other side of the Atlantic 
of recognizing the Confederacy — talk which per- 
sisted after the Emancipation Proclamation be- 
cause, as the friends of the Confederacy there said, 
the North never could be victorious. But, above 
all, it gave Mr. Lincoln the man he sought to save 
the Union. 

Grant was a West Pointer. Nobody knew much 
of him when the war broke out in spite of his hav- 
ing won a captaincy in the Mexican War, for seven 
years before the fall of Sumter he had left the army 
and gone into business. The first shot in 186 1 
brought him quickly back. He took the appoint- 
ment given him without haggling or complaining. 
He did the thing they asked of him and so well that 



214 ^oy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

before the end of 1861 he was In command of a 
big military division, that Including the southern part 
of Illinois and the western part of Kentucky. It 
was In clearing the Confederates out of this terri- 
tory that in February, 1862, he attacked Fort Don- 
elson on the Cumberland River and sent a famous 
message to the commander: "No terms other than 
unconditional and Immediate surrender can be ac- 
cepted." "Unconditional Surrender" (U. S.) 
Grant now became his name, and major general of 
volunteers his rank. Mr. Lincoln, watching his 
work in dispatches and on maps, noted that it was 
steady, patient, untiring, and when in the summer 
of 1862, after McClellan's failure to reach Rich- 
mond, he felt the need of a fresh military mind to 
help him in Washington and decided to call General 
Halleck, Grant's commander in chief. East, it was 
Grant that he put at the head of the army in west 
Tennessee. 

There was much opposition to Grant's promotion 
from men within and without the army. They came 
to Mr. Lincoln with old slanders. Mr. Lincoln had 
one answer, "I cannot spare this man. He fights." 

Grant finally. In the spring of 1863, came in his 
fighting to the siege of VIcksburg. He made some 
moves that Mr. Lincoln thought unwise, but he kept 
his hands off. And now this man that fought had 
given him what was so far in the war the success of 
successes. After his victory Grant did not wait an 
hour to follow up his advantage. He pursued, 
cleaning up as he went, and was ready at the right 
moment to help in the next great Western military 



Steady in Storms 215 

movement — opening eastern Tennessee. There 
were many loyal people in eastern Tennessee and 
they had suffered much through the war. Mr. Lin- 
coln had set his heart on relieving them, but his 
armies there had never succeeded, and largely for 
the reason McClellan did not succeed: the generals 
had the "slows." Things were in a very bad way 
by September of this year, 1863, the Union armies 
being shut up in Chattanooga and unable even to 
get proper food. Mr. Lincoln promptly turned the 
problem of relieving them over to Grant, who lost 
no time either in getting in food or in bringing up 
troops. In November his armies attacked the Con- 
federates entrenched on the heights around the town 
and drove them from their vantage points. 

Nothing now was too much to do for this general 
who, while his enemies abused him, plotting his 
ruin, kept silent and fought. Congress revived for 
him an old military grade that had lapsed, that of 
lieutenant general, a rank that had never been given 
to any one except George Washington; and in 
March, 1864, Lieutenant General Grant was put in 
command of all the armies of the United States. 

Only two large Confederate forces now remained 
in the field, that which under Grant's generalship 
had been driven from around Chattanooga but which 
still threatened the Union forces in that part of the 
country and General Lee's army which General 
Meade had been watching but never injuring in all 
the months since Gettysburg. Grant's job was to 
see that these two forces were beaten and scattered. 
The first he turned over to General W. T. Sherman, 



2i6 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

who had been under him through all his hardest cam- 
paigns, and the second he took hold of himself. 

What a relief to Mr. Lincoln, after this long 
three years' hunt for a general, to turn over the com- 
mandership to a man who always attended strictly 
to his business of fighting, never mixing politics with 
it, who attacked whenever he could get the chance, 
who used the forces he had, whose one idea was 
Mr. Lincoln's idea — to put down the rebellion. 

Mr. Lincoln put it up to Grant to end the war. 
He did not ask his plans — didn't want to know them; 
he told the general, "You are vigilant and self-re- 
liant. I am pleased with this and wish not to ob- 
trude any constraints or restraints upon you. If 
there is anything that is within my power to give, 
do not fail to let me know it. And now, with a 
brave army and a just cause, may God sustain you." 

The relief came none too soon, for he had another 
task on hand and that was fighting the tremendous 
civilian army that had arisen in the North to prevent 
his reelection. It was an army made up not only 
of Democrats who hated him because he was not of 
their party; of Copperheads who wanted to see the 
South succeed; of Abolitionists who held him re- 
sponsible for not destroying slavery at once, root 
and branch, though there was no human, not to say 
legal, way of doing that; of pacifists who so hated 
the horrors of war that they were willing to sacrifice 
the Union and the chance of giving freedom to hun- 
dreds of thousands of human beings — but of thou- 
sands of his own party — men who thought he should 
have issued the Emancipation Proclamation earlier 



Steady in Storms 217 

and men who thought he should not have Issued it 
at all; men who believed in the Emancipation Proc- 
lamation but would not consent to an amendment to 
the Constitution abolishing slavery forever from 
the Union; men who thought he should have dis- 
missed General McClellan earlier or not at all ; who 
didn't like this or that member of the Cabinet. 
Every move he had made or refused to make had 
turned somebody against him, and these people were 
now as determined to defeat him for a second term 
as the Democrats and secessionists themselves. 

All through the winter and spring of 1864 they 
looked for somebody that they could put in his place. 
Mr. Lincoln was exasperatingly indifferent to their 
efforts. He showed no spite or ill feeling. If the, 
people wanted somebody else it was their right to 
have him. He had no business to interfere. 

But the people did not want somebody else — that 
was clear. General Fremont was a candidate, and 
it was said that "thousands" would flock to nomi- 
nate him — four hundred came. Mr. Chase, the 
Secretary of the Treasury, was a candidate, but his 
own State of Ohio asked for Mr. Lincoln. When 
the convention met in June the politicians all agreed 
the people would not take anybody in his place. 

Mr. Lincoln was no doubt right about the popu- 
lar demand for him: "They probably knew it was 
never wise to swap horses in crossing a stream and 
had concluded that he was not so poor a horse but 
that they might make a botch of it if they tried to 
swap." 

But no horse ever had more difficulty in fording 



2l8 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

a stream to keep his feet and the track than Mr. 
Lincoln now had. Everybody that had opposed him 
combined to fret, nag, and bewilder him. They 
came at him from all sides, trying to break his will 
and confuse his judgment. They did not by any 
means agree as to what should be done, but they 
did agree to oppose whatever Mr. Lincoln did. 

The severest test of a man's courage and fidelity 
to purpose comes when not only his enemies but his 
friends turn on him. If he sticks then to the thing 
he has undertaken, he is a man. Mr. Lincoln did 
stick. He handled the different forces that threat- 
ened or hectored him bravely, sensibly, and for the 
most part good-naturedly. It was only now and 
then that he burst out in contempt or indignation at 
some particularly outrageous performance which he 
thought was hurting the cause. 

There was the draft. Grant needed men — many 
of them. He believed that a great, fresh outpour- 
ing of troops might quickly end the war. Friend 
and foe warned Mr. Lincoln that he could never 
be elected if he made another draft. "But what 
good is it to me to be elected if I have no country? 
We need the men to save the country," and he asked 
for 500,000. 

Then there were the peace-at-any-price people. 
They accused him of so hating the South that he was 
willing to bleed the North to crush her, yet no man 
in the North was more just and tolerant to the South 
than he and no man suffered more over the loss 
and suffering of war. The war had been undertaken 



Steady in Storms 219 

to save something more precious than life and it 
would continue until that end was secure. 

Even so powerful an editor as Horace Greeley 
joined this faction that accused Mr. Lincoln of not 
doing his part to end the suffering. There were 
agents from Jefferson Davis now in Canada, Greeley 
claimed, prepared to make peace and Mr. Lincoln 
was so obstinate and bloodthirsty he would not send 
any one to treat with them. Mr. Lincoln finally 
turned the tables neatly on his critic. He sent him 
as an agent to see the gentlemen, telling him that 
any proposition they had which recognized the Union 
and abolished slavery would be considered, but as 
Mr. Lincoln believed, they had neither powers nor 
proposition; they were mischief-makers. But when 
Mr. Greeley failed "to crack the nut," found Mr. 
Lincoln was right and he wrong, it only added an- 
other grievance against the President ! 

There were the selfish — those who in these dread- 
ful times thought only of advancement, office, 
claims, favors. His patience was often badly 
strained by their insistence. "Go away, my man. 
Go away," he said one day to a soldier who wanted 
him to interfere. "I might as well try to bail out 
the Potomac with a teaspoon as to attend to all the 
details of the army." 

To another man who was pestering him to give 
personal attention to some small claim, he told a 
story of a steamboat captain he had known on an 
Illinois river. This captain always took the wheel 
when the steamer reached the rapids. One day 



220 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

when the boat was plunging and wallowing and it 
was taking all his skill to keep her in the narrow 
channel, a boy pulled his coat-tails. "Say, Mister 
Captain," he said, "I wish you would stop your boat 
a minute, I've lost my apple overboard!" 

He was the captain of a ship tossed and beaten 
by winds and waves and hundreds of passengers were 
calling to him to stop while they picked up their lost 
apples I 

These selfish and inconsiderate people were but 
a small annoyance beside those who, agreeing with 
him that the Union should be saved, disagreed so 
violently with him about the way he took to save it 
that they were almost willing to let it be destroyed 
rather than let him succeed in his plans. 

There had come to be by this time several differ- 
ent classes of Unionists. Mr. Lincoln once made 
a table of them. There were the people who were 
for the Union: 

With, but not without, slavery. 

Without, but not with, slavery. 

With or without, but preferred it with. 

With or without, but preferred it without. 

There was a second division of those who believed 
in Union without slavery who wanted : 

1, Gradual but not immediate emancipation. 

2, Immediate but not gradual emancipation. 
Those in the above group who leaned to slavery 

were more bitter than ever just now because they 
saw that by saving the Union in Mr. Lincoln's way 
they were going to get finally something much more 
sweeping than the Emancipation Proclamation — 



Steady in Storms 221 

and that was an amendment to the Constitution, 
abolishing slavery for good and all In the United 
States. That was in the platform on which Mr. 
Lincoln was running. You should read this plank 
carefully in order to understand how much more 
his election now would mean to human freedom than 
it would have meant if he had been satisfied to stop 
with the Emancipation Proclamation. 

"Resolved, That as slavery was the cause, and now con- 
stitutes the strength, of this rebellion, and as it must be, 
always and ever3'where, hostile to the principles of republican 
government, justice and the national safety demand its utter 
and complete extirpation from the soil of the republic; and 
that while we uphold and maintain the acts and proclamation 
by which the government, in its own defense, has aimed a death- 
blow at this gigantic evil, we are in favor, furthermore, of such 
an amendment to the Constitution, to be made by the people in 
conformity with its provisions, as shall terminate and forever 
prohibit the existence of slavery within the limits of the juris- 
diction of the United States. 

These divisions among the Republican Unionists, 
with the suspicion and hate and crime they caused, 
gave great joy naturally to the Democrats who had 
nominated General McClellan. He was a good 
Union man and believed in carrying on the war, but 
as he was opposed to Mr. Lincoln everybody else 
opposed flocked about him, among them the peace 
people. Much to his disgust, even the secessionists 
claimed him as their friend and exhorted their ar- 
mies to win a victory in order to help his election. 

By August there seemed little chance of Mr. Lin- 
coln winning. His best and most hopeful friends 



222 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

assured him it was impossible. He thought so him- 
self. Now, Mr. Lincoln wanted to be reelected. 
He wanted to finish the job, he said. As he saw it, 
the only way that the Union could be saved now was 
his way. If the people did not take him they would 
get a divided country — one-half of it built on slav- 
ery. "Very well," he said grimly, one day when an 
alarmed supporter was telling him how black the 
outlook was, "very well. It's the people's business, 
the election is in their hands. If they turn their 
backs to the fire and get scorched in the rear, they'll 
find they have got to sit on the blister." 

But whatever happened, he did not propose to 
turn his back to the fire. 

You have seen that often in Mr. Lincoln's effort 
to put down the rebellion he was saved from disaster 
in the very nick of time — at Antietam, at Gettysburg, 
at Chattanooga. Now at the moment when he was 
admitting probable defeat, a victory came to aid 
him — a brilliant and important one. 

When General Grant took charge of all the Union 
armies he had put General Sherman at the head of 
the Western forces. His task was to drive out the 
Confederates still massed south and east of Chat- 
tanooga. Sherman had pushed the enemy with tre- 
mendous energy, beating him at every point until at 
the moment when Northern discouragement was at 
its height, he wired Mr. Lincoln: 

"Atlanta is ours and fairly won." 

Sherman's message was like a summer thunder 
shower, clearing the air of suffocation and leaving 
brisk breezes and fresh life behind. And with it 



Steady in Storms 223 

went other victories of vast importance : one was the 
capture of the last port through which the Confed- 
erates were able to trade, that of Mobile Bay on 
the Gulf of Mexico. Through it they had been 
sending out cotton, receiving back food and arms. 
Now came news from Admiral Farragut that this 
last big leak was stopped. And then came swiftly a 
series of battles fought by General Phil Sheridan 
which closed the Shenandoah Valley, through which, 
from the beginning of the war. General Lee had been 
able to send his daring forces on raids threatening 
Washington and Pennsylvania. 

Nothing in all the war had worried Mr. Lincoln 
more than these dashes at Washington. He could 
not endure the idea of its capture and any danger 
of it — and there had been danger more than once 
— threw him, cool-headed as he was, almost into 
panic. In this very summer, when things were so 
dark and everybody turning against him, one of these 
raids had taken place, the Confederates coming so 
near to the town that his summer home was con- 
sidered unsafe. 

Grant had at once put General Sheridan on the 
job of clearing out the valley and now it was done 
— done with a fire and dash that recalled "Stone- 
wall Jackson," the famous Confederate general 
killed at Chancellorsville who, in the early days of 
the war, had so tormented the Union Army from 
this very valley which Sheridan now made safe. 

These victories piling up took many arguments 
from the mouths of Mr. Lincoln's enemies. He was 
finishing the war. It might take time — more hard 



224 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

fighting, more suffering; but victory now seemed 
sure, victory with the Union, a Union from which 
human slavery, which had so nearly wrecked it, 
would be forever wiped. 

People believed it, and a little later when the elec- 
tion came they proved their faith, for it was Abra- 
ham Lincoln, not General McClellan, to whom the 
majority gave their votes. 



CHAPTER X 

VICTORY I 

He held his place — 
Held the long purpose like a growing tree — 
Held on through blame and faltered not at praise, 
And when he fell, in whirlwind, he went down 
As when a kingly cedar, green with boughs, 
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, 
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky. 

Edwin Markham. 

IF you will turn back to those days in 1861 when 
Mr. Lincoln made his call for men to put down 
the rebellion, you will find him saying that the 
question to be settled by the war was whether or no 
a government by the people could be broken apart 
by a group of these same people when they were 
dissatisfied with the results of an election. If that 
could happen, then no free government could long 
endure on the earth. It was not only the fate of 
the United States but of men everywhere that was 
at stake. 

As the war went on he kept this question con- 
stantly in the people's mind. Can you guard this 
Union you have made? Can you save it from this 
attack from the inside? Do you care enough for 
it to hold out whatever it may cost you? He would 
not let them forget what they were fighting for. He 
225 



226 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

continually thrust forward the idea in what he wrote 
or said. It is the theme of one of the greatest of 
his speeches, made in November of 1863, when the 
Gettysburg battlefield was dedicated as a national 
cemetery. Every Scout should know this Gettys- 
burg speech by heart. 

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth 
on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and 
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether 
that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can 
long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. 
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final 
resting place for those who here gave their lives that that 
nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we 
should do this. 

"But, in a larger sense we cannot dedicate — we cannot 
consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, 
living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far 
above our poor power to add or detract. The world will 
little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can 
never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, 
rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they 
who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather 
for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before 
us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion 
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of 
devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall 
not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have 
a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by 
the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." 

Mr. Lincoln did more than to talk and fight for 
unionism. He did his best to live it; that is, he did 
his best to work with all men who wanted to save 
the Union, however much they differed from him in 



7 '^ 




Mr. Lincoln and His Son Thomas, Familiarly Known as Tad, 
About 1864 

Photograph by Brady. 



Victory! 227 

their views of how it was to be done, however hard 
they might be to work with, however unjust, re- 
vengeful, or insolent they might be to him per- 
sonally. 

No man ever treated another with more contempt 
than Mr. Stanton had at one time treated Mr. Lin- 
coln. But Lincoln knew that Stanton was able, that 
he had a passion for the Union that was like his 
own; and that the Union might have his services, he 
made him Secretary of War. 

Horace Greeley at one time wilfully misrepre- 
sented the President in the Tribune. He had let- 
ters from Greeley in his possession which would have 
disposed thoroughly of the harmful accusations, but 
to publish them would have discredited Greeley; 
and the Union needed the support of the Tribune. 
Rather than weaken that support he himself suf- 
fered a serious personal wrong. 

Mr. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, intrigued 
under his very eyes to prevent his renomination in 
1864; but Mr. Lincoln ignored the treachery. He 
knew that Chase was of great value to the cause, 
that his one weakness was an uncontrolled desire 
to be President of the United States. "He would 
be a good President," was all that Mr. Lincoln 
would say when his friends pointed out Chase's ac- 
tivities. He would have nothing to do with any 
contest that would in any way divide those who were 
supporting the Union. 

This will to unite with others for a main pur- 
pose, cost what it might to his own pride, reputa- 
tion, ambition, became more and more a part of 



228 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

him. That great American poet, Walt Whitman, 
was much in Washington during the war and saw 
Mr. Lincoln so often, as he went to and fro about 
his business, that they fell to nodding and smiling 
at each other, though, so far as Whitman tells us, 
they never spoke. The poet had a great under- 
standing of men, and he came to feel finally, as he 
says, that the hardpan of Mr. Lincoln's character 
was unionism, that it had become in him a "new 
virtue" — something to be added to the other vir- 
tues that he found in his character, such as "hon- 
esty, goodness, shrewdness, conscience." 

Whitman was right. Unionism was not only the 
great passion of his heart, the backbone of all his 
hopes and dreams for this land and all lands; but 
it was a part of his character. This being true, 
you can understand how much his reelection in 1864 
meant to him. It answered the great question that 
had been following him all through the war. It 
showed, as he said, that he, who was most devoted 
to the Union and most opposed to treason, would 
receive most of the people's votes. That is, that 
when the people had made a government through 
which they believed they could secure liberty and 
equal opportunity, they would not allow it to be 
broken up by attacks from within any more than 
by attacks from without. 

The election meant the end of the war. It was 
an order from the people to go ahead on the lines 
that Grant had laid down. It would take a miracle 
now to save the Confederacy. Lee's army in Rich- 
mond and Petersburg was besieged by Grant and 



Victory! 229 

dally growing weaker, while Grant was daily grow- 
ing stronger. Johnston, with the only other large 
Confederate body, was being driven northward by 
Sherman, who, after the fall of Atlanta, leaving 
forces behind to take care of the enemy still remain- 
ing in Tennessee, had started on a march through 
Georgia. He had captured Savannah and Charles- 
ton, and then, turning northward, had swept the 
Confederate forces ahead of him. That is, Lee 
and Johnston with their armies were being gradu- 
ally pressed together by the forces south as well as 
north of them. This meant that in not many weeks 
the military end must come. 

But Mr. Lincoln was leaving all this to Grant. 
He had other things to do. The first of these was 
to make sure that the cause of all this trouble — 
slavery, was forever ended in the United States. 
As we have seen, the Emancipation Proclamation 
did not do this. It needed an amendment to the 
Constitution to make it certain; and this amendment 
had, at Mr. Lincoln's request, been put into thie 
platform on which he had run and been reelected. 
It was now before Congress. In January it was 
adopted. Never, in all his troubled life, had he had 
a deeper satisfaction. "This amendment is a king's 
cure for all the evils ; it winds the whole thing up," 
he said the night after its passage to the serenaders 
who surrounded the White House cheering him and 
clamoring for a speech. 

To be sure, there was still work to do, for an 
amendment to the Constitution requires ratification 
by two thirds of the States. He thought they were 



230 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

going to get it. That very day Illinois had ratified. 
In the next month sixteen States followed her and 
two of these, Virginia and Louisiana, had been 
among the seceders. Before the end of the year the 
amendment was proclaimed a part of the Consti- 
tution of the United States. 

Mr. Lincoln rejoiced the more over the amend- 
ment because he felt the negroes had shown them- 
selves worthy of it. They had helped themselves 
from the beginning of the war. When it was pro- 
posed to make soldiers of them, there had been on 
both sides ridicule and protest — they would not 
fight. But they had fought, and it was not many 
months after the Emancipation Proclamation was 
issued before Mr. Lincoln had the satisfaction of 
answering those who declared they would not fight 
for negroes, that there were 200,000 negroes fight- 
ing for them — that is, fighting for the Union. If 
they would not fight when the reward of that fight- 
ing was to be their own freedom, he felt that they 
were not worth freeing, but they had made good 
soldiers. 

Mr. Lincoln not only put the negroes into the 
army, and insisted that they be rewarded according 
to the services that they gave, but in every way he 
could he encouraged them to go to work for them- 
selves, go into business, go to school. He sought 
in every way to show them his friendly interest. 
There was bitter criticism, particularly in Washing- 
ton, of the attention he gave them, but it did not 
budge him. There was a truly great negro who 
arose during the war — Frederick Douglass; and Mr. 



Victory! 231 

Lincoln, v/ishing to talk to him, sent his own car- 
riage to bring him to the White House to take tea 
with him. 

At the last New Year's reception, held on Janu- 
ary I, 1865, hundreds of colored people gathered 
at the doors, hesitating to enter yet desiring to 
shake the President's hand. When the crowd of 
whites had retired, they began timidly to enter. 
Wearied as he was by the long hours of handshak- 
ing, when Mr. Lincoln discovered his visitors, he 
insisted that all should be admitted. They pressed 
about him, weeping, blessing him, and kissing his 
hand. To the negro Mr. Lincoln now was friend 
and savior. Not many of them, perhaps, realized 
just what had happened. Few of them certainly 
realized the burden of responsibility and effort that 
freedom would bring them; but all of them real- 
ized that the hated word "Slave" was wiped out. 
He was "Massa Linkin," "Uncle Sam" — one never 
to be forgotten when they prayed. Better than 
many white people, the negroes seem to have real- 
ized the burden that was upon him — " 'Pears hke 
he got everything hitched to him," one faithful 
negro said, in exhorting his friends to pray for the 
President. To all of them he came as something 
more than a man. "He walks the earf like the 
Lord," they said. 

The most striking proof of what the negro, backed 
by the government, had been able to do for himself 
came on March 4, 1865, when Mr. Lincoln was 
inaugurated, for in the procession which accompa- 
nied him to the Capitol were not only negro regi- 



232 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

ments of such soldierly bearing as to wring admira- 
tion from even the hostile, but there were delegations 
from colored civic bodies, proofs of the promptness 
and efficiency with which representatives of the race 
had seized the opportunity that under his leader- 
ship had been held out to them. 

It brought him great joy. Indeed those who had 
begun to feel that he never would be glad again, 
so heavily had the war weighed down his heart and 
mind, were already noting a change in his color, his 
eye, the way he carried himself. He was begin- 
ning to enjoy things again. Particularly was he en- 
joying his boy Tad — the only one that had been 
with him after Willie's death in February of 1862, 
for his eldest son Robert was still in college. 

People noted now that Mr. Lincoln rarely went 
out without Tad at his side. He even rode in the 
carriage beside him when he went to his inaugura- 
tion. Tad, now ten years old, was a wonderful 
companion for him, for a boy more full of life and 
vigor and more bubbling over with mischief never 
lived. One of Mr. Lincoln's secretaries, John Hay, 
a very young man himself, only twenty-four, a lover 
of life in all its forms, lived in the White House, 
and has left a charming picture of the boy. 

He had a bad opinion of books, Mr. Hay tells 
us, and no opinion of discipline. He thought little 
of a tutor who would not help him in kite flying, in 
yoking his kids to a chair, or driving his dogs tan- 
dem across the south lawn. Tad was a passionate 
lover of animals. He filled the White House with 
cats and kittens, dogs and goats, in much the same 



Victory! 233 

way that Mr. Roosevelt's boys did in his day. If 
harm came to one of his pets, it was such a grief to 
him that it was a grief to Mr. Lincoln himself. A 
pet goat went astray once when he was in New York 
with his mother, and Mr. Lincoln as well as the 
housekeeper spent time in trying to hunt Nannie 
up ; and when they failed, Mr. Lincoln wrote a long 
letter explaining the case. 

Tad loved to get up things. Once for days, in 
collusion with some of his little friends, he held a 
minstrel show in the attic of the White House, he 
being a great success as The Black Statue. A penny 
was charged for admission, and soldiers, orderlies, 
and strangers in town flocked to this unusual show. 

One morning, being at a loss for something to 
do, he bought out the stock of gingerbread from an 
old lady who kept a stand near the White House, 
teased a government carpenter to give him a board 
and sawhorses, and set up shop in front of the im- 
posing entrance through which all distinguished vis- 
itors passed. You can be sure that there was no 
senator or ofl'ice seeker who came up that morning 
that did not buy something from the keen little mer- 
chant. When he was discovered and a sudden end 
put to his business, his gingerbread was about gone 
and his hat full of money. 

Mr. Lincoln backed him up in most of his esca- 
pades. "Let him run," Mr. Hay quotes the Presi- 
dent as saying, "he has time enough to learn his let- 
ters and get pokey. Bob was just such a little ras- 
cal, and now he is a very decent boy." And in 
truth Tad was a decent boy — truthful and generous. 



234 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

There was many a poor woman and tattered soldier 
that some rigorous servant was trying to keep away 
from Mr. Lincoln whom Tad seized by the hand 
and dragged to his father, insisting that their cases 
be immediately attended to. 

Truly as he loved his father, Tad never had any 
proper sense of showing him respect. He had 
picked up many a street song about "Old Abe" and 
would sing these songs saucily before his father, 
often following at his heels about the White House 
grounds, singing a doggerel at the top of his voice, 
Mr. Lincoln paying no attention. 

Tad was an enthusiastic lover of the soldiers, 
and never was prouder than when, at the request 
of the captain of Company K which guarded the 
White House grounds, he was allowed to have a 
uniform and to wear it. Often he rode, in full 
regalia, with this company as it attended his father; 
and he took an active part in its games and pranks. 

The way Mr. Lincoln "spoiled" Tad came in for 
much criticism from both friends and enemies in 
Washington. These were the same people who 
criticized him for telling amusing stories, for read- 
ing funny books, like Artemus Ward's, for sitting 
down at the mess table of Company K, for chaffing 
with the common soldiers when he visited the camps, 
for giving a long audience to Tom Thumb when 
Barnum's circus visited Washington, for going out 
by himself in the morning to buy his own paper, for 
looking up information that he wanted in different 
departments instead of sending orderlies to get it 
for him — criticized him for being natural and kind 



Victory! 235 

and simple in all his ways, for not feeling himself 
above others, for wanting them to feel that he was 
their friend as well as their President. 

Mr. Lincoln's joy that the war was so near an 
end was the more beautiful because it had no trace 
of exultation over those who had opposed him in 
the North or fought him in the South. We talk 
about being good losers, but the real test of a man 
and a gentleman is being a good winner. It is poor 
sportsmanship not to try to make him whom you have 
defeated forget his defeat. The conquerer in war 
who will not forgive but will punish and punish and 
punish, beyond the terms of peace, is a maker of 
new wars. Mr. Lincoln was too great a gentle- 
man as well as too wise a man to want to humiliate 
those he had conquered. It was no pleasure for him 
to triumph over any one, he told the serenaders 
that crowded under his window the night of his re- 
election. He got no satisfaction from knowing that 
somebody had been disappointed or pained by his 
success. 

He talked the same thing to the group of excited 
young men who inside were gloating over the re- 
turns as they came in and who were particularly 
exultant over the defeat of certain violent anti- 
Lincoln men. "You have more of that feeling of 
personal resentment than I. Perhaps I may have 
too little of it, but I never thought it paid. A man 
has not time to spend half his life in quarrels. If 
any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the 
past against him." 

One of his chief anxieties in these days was to 



236 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

get the States that had been out or half out of the 
Union back in, to get them settled into their old 
relations, their rebellion forgotten, and the whole 
country backing them in all honest efforts to accept 
the results of the war. He wanted them to feel 
at home, to work to have things as if there had been 
no war. 

If this was to be done the North must not med- 
dle overmuch with the government the States set 
up as they came back — they must not interfere with 
their elections. So far as possible he wanted them 
to come back in their own way. The question was 
not at all, as he saw it, whether a new State gov- 
ernment was perfect or not. The point was to get 
something and help to improve it as time went on. 
One of his last counsels in regard to the government 
of the States that were returning was not to reject 
and spurn what they tried to do. "If we do that," 
he said, "we would do our utmost to disorganize 
and disperse them." True, the new government 
might be to what it should be only "as the egg is to 
the fowl, but we shall sooner have the fowl by 
hatching the egg than by smashing it." 

In all his talk and writing about getting things 
to going again in the old way there was this same 
sound good sense and this same kindliness. But 
he had as great difficulty in persuading men to his 
views of the problem as he had had in holding them 
to his way of saving the Union. The chief hin- 
drance came from a hateful spirit of revenge that a 
few men felt toward all who had tried to go out 
of the Union. They refused to trust their efforts 



Victory! 237 

and their pledges. When Louisiana, in 1863, after 
the Confederates were swept from power, started 
a new Union government and wanted to send rep- 
resentatives to Congress, there were people who 
insisted that Northerners alone should be elected. 
Mr. Lincoln realized both the injustice and the bad 
policy of such a procedure. "To send a parcel of 
Northern men here as representatives, elected at 
the point of the bayonet, would be disgusting and 
outrageous, and were I a member of Congress I 
would vote against admitting any such man to a 
seat." He was for helping the people back in the 
way they wanted to come, however wrong he 
thought they might have been in going out. 

Mr. Lincoln was no more willing to punish the 
men who had led in the rebellion than he was to hin- 
der and humiliate the people in their efforts to re- 
store their old relation to the Union. Congress had 
passed an act declaring the leaders in the Confeder- 
acy traitors. They were to be imprisoned, hanged, 
but he would hear to none of it. Unyielding as he 
was when any one talked about a peace which would 
sacrifice either the Union or freedom for the black 
man, he was all mercy when they came to talk about 
the men who had led in the rebellion. In every pos- 
sible way he spread the idea that he would have 
nothing to do with any form of revenge. It shamed 
him that the great cause should be soiled by so 
mean a spirit. 

"I used to know a boy in Springfield," Mr. Lin- 
coln said, when some one asked him what was he 
going to do with Jefferson Davis, "who saved up 



238 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

his money and bought a coon. But the coon was 
too much for him — fought him with tooth and claw, 
scratched his face, tore his clothes. After a few 
days he took the animal out on a leash. 

"Why don't you get rid of that coon, if he is such 
a trouble to you?" a man who saw him sitting dis- 
consolately on the curb asked. 

"Hush," the boy said, "don't you see he is gnaw- 
ing his rope off? I will let him do it and then I will 
go home and tell the folks he got away from me." 

This spirit of mercy grew in him. When he 
came to his inauguration on March 4, 1864, he gave 
it expression in one of the most beautiful paragraphs 
in all English literature, his idea of the spirit with 
which men should look upon the mighty problems 
which always follow a war: 

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firm- 
ness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us 
strive on to finish the w^ork we are in, to bind up the nation's 
wounds; to care for him. who shall have borne the battle, and 
for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve 
and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and 
with all nations." 

Not only was it for the North to be merciful; he 
felt it should be humble. The North as well as the 
South had consented at the start to the continuance 
of slavery in the country. 

"If we shall suppose," he said in his inaugural, 
"that American slavery is one of those offenses 
which, in the providence of God, must needs come, 
but which, having continued through His appointed 
time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives 



Victory! 239 

to both North and South this terrible war, as the 
woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall 
we discern therein any departure from those divine 
attributes which the believers in a living God always 
ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope — fervently do 
we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speed- 
ily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue 
until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hun- 
dred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, 
and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash 
shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as 
was said three thousand years ago, so still it must 
be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and 
righteous altogether.' " 

A few days after his inauguration, Mr. Lincoln 
took a vacation — took it with the army behind 
Petersburg. With Mrs. Lincoln, Tad, and a few 
of his friends, he sailed down the Potomac, and up 
the James to Grant's headquarters, where he re- 
mained for ten days. The time was filled with vis- 
its to the soldiers, in camp and in their trenches, 
with long talks with officers before roaring camp 
fires, with reviews of the army, with excursions up 
and down the river with Admiral Porter who was 
commanding the naval forces supporting Grant. 
All of the business of war went on under his eyes. 
There was much hard fighting, and he saw much of 
the wounded and dead; but he shirked none of the 
sorrow. He was supported by the consciousness 
that it must end now very soon. 

When he was with Grant and Porter, he fre- 
quently turned the talk to what was to be done with 



240 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

the leaders and the rank and file of the Confederacy 
when the war was over. He wanted Grant to be 
very liberal with Lee and his men. "We must get 
them to plowing at once," he said, "to gathering in 
their crops, to eating popcorn at their own firesides. 
If you can get them to do that, you cannot get them 
to shoulder a musket again for half a century." "If 
Grant is wise," he told Porter, "he will give them 
their guns to shoot crows with and their horses to 
plow with — it will do no harm." As for the lead- 
ers themselves, his whole idea was, during this visit 
at City Point, to "let them down easy." 

Mr. Lincoln was still at Grant's headquarters 
when, on the morning of April 3d, news was brought 
to him that Richmond was being abandoned. 
Petersburg at last had fallen, and General Lee saw 
that the capitol could no longer be held. Jefferson 
Davis and his Cabinet had left, and Lee was march- 
ing his army southward, with Grant after him in 
double quick time. 

Richmond had suffered cruelly from fire and bom- 
bardment, and was in terrible disorder now that its 
defenders had been withdrawn. But, regardless of 
all this, Mr. Lincoln insisted that he should see the 
city. Two days after the evacuation began, he en- 
tered with little Tad, three or four friends, and a 
small guard, and walked through the burning, shat- 
tered town. 

Its streets were filled with drunken whites and 
blacks, and from doors and windows hostile men 
and women watched his progress. Never perhaps 
had Mr. Lincoln done a more reckless thing than 



Victory! 24 1 

in this visit to Richmond; but here, as all through 
his term as President, he ignored danger. He had 
that natural, instinctive courage which leads men to 
go where they think their work calls them, indiffer- 
ent and even impatient of caution. From the day 
that he had been nominated he had had repeated 
warnings of danger to his life. It was only the 
watchfulness of the War Department and of de- 
tective agencies working separately that saved him 
from assassination on his way to Washington for 
his inauguration. 

As the war went on the number of disordered 
minds that felt that, by putting an end to his life, 
the cause of the South might be served, multiplied. 
Mr. Lincoln would hear just as little as he could of 
the plots that were unearthed, and yet they came to 
him so thick that he had a drawer in his desk which 
he called his "Assassination" drawer. "You get 
used to anything" he would say sometimes to 
alarmed friends. His burdens were so heavy and 
so many that he would not cripple himself by in- 
dulging in thoughts of personal danger. The guard 
that was kept about the White House and the secret 
service men who attended him everywhere had great 
difficulty in watching him. He liked to go out alone, 
to ride alone. He disliked guards. One of his 
habits that gave them the greatest uneasiness was 
slipping away from them on summer nights after 
he had finished his work at the White House, to 
walk alone to the Soldiers' Home, three miles away. 

Mr. Lincoln was quite as indifferent to danger 
when visiting the armies as he was in going about 



242 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

Washington. More than once in the war he ven- 
tured into conspicuous places along a battle line, 
and had to be hurried away by watchful protectors 
who realized what a wonderful target his tall, lean 
figure, topped by a high black hat, made for Con- 
federate riflemen. 

As he had gone about Washington and along bat- 
tle lines, careless of harm to himself, so now he 
went among the distracted, embittered people of 
Richmond. No bitterness or enmity toward them 
was in his heart. Possibly he was willing to run 
this great danger to show them that he was their 
friend, not their conqueror. The wisest among 
them knew this. When in the winter before he had 
gone himself to Hampton Roads to tell Alexander 
Stephens and other agents of the Confederacy that 
they could have peace as soon as they would give 
up their idea of separation and consent to emanci- 
pation, and not before, the question of what would 
be done with the leaders of the rebellion had come 
up. Would they be hanged? Stephens had said 
to him then something which pleased him enor- 
mously: "To tell the truth, we have none of us 
been much afraid of being hanged with you as Presi- 
dent." 

Directly after the visit to Richmond Mr. Lincoln 
went back to Washington. All the way home his 
mind was filled with ideas of mercy. As they 
approached the city, Mrs. Lincoln said to him, 
"Washington is filled with our enemies." The 
President turned on her sharply. "Don't use that 
word. There are no enemies now." He was not 



Victory! 243 

willing that even in his own household the thought 
should be uttered. 

He kept this idea uppermost in his talks with the 
members of his Cabinet. On April 14th there was 
a Cabinet meeting. The President was very happy. 
Lee had surrendered to Grant on the 9th. Only 
Johnston's army remained in arms, and its speedy 
surrender to Sherman was certain. He was sure 
they would soon hear of it, he said, perhaps even 
before morning, because the night before he had had 
the dream that all through the war had come to 
him before great events — before the fall of Sumter, 
Antietam, Getty^sburg, the fall of Atlanta — a dream 
of a dim, mysterious ship sailing to a dark and un- 
known shore. Something important always hap- 
pened after it. The only important event likely now 
to occur was the surrender of Johnston. 

That would end it all, and their whole thought 
now must be to bring back the States into their old 
relation, make everybody happy again; there must 
be no unnecessary humiliating or tormenting — the 
war was over. Nobody need expect him, he in- 
sisted, to have any part in hanging or killing. Let 
the leaders get out of the country if they wanted 
to — shoo them off. But no resentment. They are 
to be our fellow citizens now, and we must treat 
them so. There had been enough sacrifice of lives. 

And so the Cabinet meeting ended; the members 
going home with their minds full of the merciful- 
ness of Abraham Lincoln. 

That evening Mrs. Lincoln had arranged a thea- 
ter party, and rather late, after dinner, they went 



244 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

with some young friends to Ford's Theater where 
a humorous play called "Our American Cousin" was 
to be given. Mr. Lincoln loved the theater. It 
rested him as almost nothing else except his "funny 
books," and this evening he seemed to get unusual 
pleasure, perhaps because he carried a lighter heart 
than he had for so many weary years. The audi- 
ence, too, were happy and friendly, and they cheered 
and waved their handkerchiefs again and again as 
he came Into his box. The third act of the play had 
been reached, and he was smiling at some gay sally, 
when suddenly the audience heard a pistol shot, 
and saw a man leap from the President's box. He 
turned toward them as he struck the stage, crying, 
"Sic semper tyrannis!" and disappeared. 

The meaning of this strange Interruption to the 
play came to the audience only as they turned their 
eyes to the box from which the man had leaped. 
There they saw that the President alone was sitting 
quietly in his seat, that over him hung Mrs. Lin- 
coln, sobbing; that men and women were crowding 
in. They heard a call for a doctor — for water. 
Then there ran through the house the whisper, "The 
President is shot — Is dying I" 

They carried him, unconscious, to a bed in a house 
across the street; and early the next morning the 
word went out to the country that Abraham Lin- 
coln was dead — dead at the very hour that the great 
cause to which he had given long years of agony and 
labor was secured. 

The heart of the country seemed to break at the 
news. In the South wise men knew that they had 




(■(Kirtcsy of George Gray Baniani 

SiMUi; 01 Lincoln Madk by George Gray Barnard 



Victory! 245 

lost their best friend, and hastened to condemn the 
deed. On the Union armies, gay as they were with 
the end of their long struggle, there fell a silence 
such as comes upon strong men when they see a 
loved father dead. For days after the news reached 
Sherman's army which was singing its way north- 
ward, no song was heard, no smile was seen. Father 
Abraham was dead. 

They carried him back to his old home in Spring- 
field, and all along the way of the slow march, men 
and women, boys and girls, passed before the bier 
as it lay in state in the cities or stood night and day 
watching the passage of the train. Many a man 
and woman grew up to tell their children and grand- 
children of the moment when the news of Abraham 
Lincoln's death reached them. The woman who is 
writing these lines, a little girl then, remembers see- 
ing her father coming toward the house — all the 
spring out of his step, his shoulders bent, of seeing 
her mother run out and hearing her alarmed cry, 
"What is it? What is It?" — of seeing, not hearing, 
a whisper in her ear, of watching her tears, of won- 
dering why the doors should be closed and crape 
hung on the knobs, of being told something she was 
far from understanding, but which she could never 
forget — "Abraham Lincoln is dead." 

And so It was. The whole North wept and no- 
body who lived ever forgot the day or hour when 
the news came. 

He was a great, good and wise man. He became 
what he was by his fidelity to what he regarded to be 
true, just, honorable and merciful. He early ac- 



246 Boy Scouts' Life of Lincoln 

cepted labor as a necessary and dignified part of 
man's life. To learn to do something well and to 
do it with all one's might was the only genuine man- 
liness, in Lincoln's judgment. The idler was a nui- 
sance to himself and his fellows. 

He learned early that a man's real kingdom is 
his mind and that no man Is so placed that he does 
not have opportunity to feed, train and rule it. 

He was equally concerned with the training of the 
heart, with keeping its Impulses clean and noble and 
kind, and though he saw all about him every form 
of evil and meanness and uncleanness, these things 
he resolutely resisted. 

He never allowed himself from his earliest life 
to despise any man, however poor and mean and 
wrong that man may have been. His whole effort 
was to help men, to understand them; and, above 
all, he desired liberty for all men. The greatest 
idea that came to him in his boyhood was that of 
the preciousness of freedom. Nothing ever stirred 
him as the thought that men in forming this gov- 
ernment meant that all under it should be free. He 
hated the contradiction that slavery was to this prin- 
ciple, and when the opportunity came, he was 
willing to sacrifice for this idea of a land In which 
all men should work together for liberty, justice, 
and opportunity, his profession, his peace of mind, 
and his life. 

Throughout the years of terrific struggle against 
disunion and for emancipation, his one concern was 
to be right in mind and heart. It did not matter 
about him, all that mattered was that the truth should 



Victory! 247 

be kept uppermost. He indulged in no contempt 
for those who differed with him. They could be 
honest and think differently, he knew. He took no 
pleasure in triumphing over any man that he had 
defeated. He would countenance no revengeful act 
toward even those who had tried to break down the 
Union whose preservation he believed to be so 
necessary to the future progress and happiness of 
the world. 

The history of this or no other land offers to the 
American Boy a more worthy and beautiful model 
on which to base and rear his own than Abraham 
Lincoln. 



